Re: [gentoo-user] Linux, reiserfs and file fragmentation

[Dale]

Michal 'vorner' Vaner wrote:
> Hello
>
> On Thu, Feb 14, 2008 at 05:06:43AM -0600, Dale wrote:
>
>> My questions; is this badly fragmented?  How can I "unfragment" all the
>> files and not bork something up badly?
>> My opinion on this tho, considering this install is about 4 years old, not
>> to bad.  I've seen worse on a windoze rig shortly after a install.  ;-)
>>
>
> I would guess the fragmented files are the big ones. And, with average
> of 2 fragments per file, it is not too much. If you have a movie with
> 30MB fragments, then it is no problem.
>
> Unless you hear lot of rattling noise from the HDD, you could leave it
> as is.
>
> And the surest way to defragment a filesystem is take everything out and
> put it back again. It will write the files one after another and will
> have no reason to split them.
>
>

So if for example I copied everything over to a different hard drive and 
then copied everything back, it would be "defragmented" then?

I would think of something like this:

Boot some live CD.
Mount old and backup drives.
Copy old drive to a backup drive using cp -av yada yada.
Make a new file system on the old drive to make sure all is clean.
Copy everything back over from the backup to the old drive using cp -av 
yada yada.

I would also take the opportunity to redo a few partitions while I was 
able to.

The biggest slow down by the way is when logging into KDE the first 
time.  It takes a long while and that drive is just a getting it.  The 
light just stays on while loading everything up.

Your thoughts and others if needed.

Dale

:-)  :-)  :-) 
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