Blackpool Linux User Group

Something I have realised over the last week or so.

While it is generally accepted that Linux partitions, as they are formatted using ext2/3 or 4, do not require to be de-fragmented on a regular basis as the way they store data is different from the Windows file format. However it needs to be remembered if you have any hard drives that are formatted using the Fat32 or NTFS file systems so that they can be accessed by both windows and Linux systems, say a network attached storage (NAS) device, these will still need to be de-fragmented as I recently found out. It has just taken several hours to de-fragment an external drive I was using in both windows and Linux that had become horrendously fragmented as I had forgotten that as this was not a main Linux Drive and as it is a NTFS partition that it was still prone to fragmentation.

There is a problem with this as I have not been able to find a utility to defrag a Windows partition from a Linux distro. I got round this by using Windows XP installed in Virtual Box and mounting the USB hard drive into the virtual PC. while this worked it did take an age as it was a 300Gig drive with nearly 200Gig of data. I would not recommended this option if the host PC is single cored with low memory to allocate to the VPC. Even on my Core2 Duo 2.66 with 4Gig Ram and allocating 1.5Gig of Ram to the VPC it took an age to do it, but I can report it was successful.

Tony