jbm@celebr.uucp (John B. Milton) (06/05/90)
In article <35887@shemp.CS.UCLA.EDU> kirkaas@oahu.cs.ucla.edu (paul kirkaas) writes: > >My 3b1 hard disk has 46% fragmentation. Time to do something about it, >I guess. I'm going to try and run Andy Fyfe's Packdisk program, but >I've never done anything like it and am a bit leary. Anyone out there >have any experience with it? Advice, cautions, bad stories? It's a great program. It works. It has strange ideas about how to organize the disk. It trys very hard to be extra careful, and thus is VERY VERY slow. In every practicle test I did, it would have been significantly faster to do a dump and restore to floppies. I started hacking on it, but haven't worked on it lately. A good way to test it is to let it play around with a floppy file system: $ # put a scratch floppy in the drive $ fdfmt10.nl $ mount /dev/fp021 /mnt $ cd /etc # make a messy file system $ cp * /mnt # DEL when you start getting errors $ rm /mnt/*[a-m] # zap ~ 1/2 of the files $ cp * /mnt # overwrite/create, DEL when you get errors $ umount /dev/fp021 $ fsck -y /dev/rfp021 # ALWAYS DO THIS BEFORE RUNNING PACKDISK!! $ packdisk /dev/rfp021 I assume you got your fragmentation numbers from fsanalyze. I got fsanalyze to a state where it seemed to be working, then did the logical thing: check a file system before and after packdisk. According to fsanalyze, there wasn't much of a change in the fragmentation. When you run packdisk a second time, it finishes up right away, so it recognizes that the file system is still in the order it likes. The output from fsanalyze doesn't seem very easy to use. Yet another neato program I haven't had the time to dig into. I also got it to work on this machine at work (celebr), which is a Unisys 6000/50 (a.k.a. Convergent Server/200). I don't think packdisk can really deal with the bit map free list, so on this machine you MUST always followup with an fsck -s. I have worked out all the wrinkles with the HD2 now. I will be posting a list of all interested buyers soon. John -- John Bly Milton IV, jbm@uncle.UUCP, n8emr!uncle!jbm@osu-cis.cis.ohio-state.edu (614) h:252-8544, w:469-1990; N8KSN, AMPR: 44.70.0.52; Don't FLAME, inform!
dt@yenta.alb.nm.us (David B. Thomas) (06/07/90)
Well, I have a horror story, but after reading John's message, I am ready to accept that it was probably my fault. The system was still running in multiuser mode, smgr, ph and everything else, and the filesystem was mounted. Anyway the symptom was that the filenames were there, but the contents were (apparently) scrambled. Each time I typed a command (ls, cat, etc) it would act as though the file was a shell script and not an executable, and complain about illegal characters. David dt@yenta.alb.nm.us