(no subject)

[fj]

Well, my habit of dragging my laptop everywhere has worked its magic again: this laptop's disk is lsowly dying. Well, two years of filling up an NTFS disk with MP3 without ever defragging is not a good idea to begin with; you end up with too little space to do the defragmentation and an $Mft catalog file that is too big to manage, and won't shink anyway because these catalog files are not designed to shrink. BUt once the harddisk is that b0rked, writing errors do not allow you to use any tool long enough to fix anything.

I had to make an emergency floppy to use the image on the hidden partition to start over on my harddisk. Twice, because the SP1 update and lingering file system problems made my machine unable to boot. I have just installed the 40 critical updates Microsoft recommends for my two year old version of XP on that image.

Still, XP is reporting "write delay" failures. One every 3 hours or so. This system is dying.

Comments

[earthling177.livejournal.com]

Hm... not sure if it applies to Windows but what I've heard many times from sysadmins before about all the other operating systems I've used (Unix, VMS and Macs, currently using a Mac under OSX) is that defragging was usually not a good idea -- you are supposed to backup any volume before defragging anyway, and once you backup the volume it's way faster and less stressful on the disk mechanisms to just re-initialize the volume and restore from the backup, which will also end up defragging the disk if you don't backup/restore and "image" but use the standard backup/restore. In the process the catalog files should also be compacted because you are creating everything from scratch.

Of course that basically only applies when you can backup to another volume that is at least large enough to contain the entire volume you are backing up in the first place, like another hard drive or tape. I don't trust tapes, so I use a firewire HD. I can see that if one had to backup/restore from small removable media, like floppies, zip, CDs or DVDs, it would probably be more practical to defrag, but I just can't bring myself to defrag without backing up, so I end up never defragging.

[fj.livejournal.com]

I am not sure XP will let itself be overwritten by a later back-up after having been re-imaged. I could find out.