Chris_F_Chiesa@cup.portal.com (04/12/91)
Hello All.
Had to edit the mountlist on the floppy-I-boot-from, last night, and
now the disk seems to "grind" back and forth a lot more than it used to,
and take longer to boot. (Well, it did last night when I first DID this
editing; this morning it seemed okay. Is my mind playing tricks on me?)
I don't really KNOW for sure why the disk might grind more after I
edited the mountlist file, but it's extremely full (no room even for a
backup copy of the mountlist) and I remember reading somewhere a few
years ago that the disk could get "fragmented" causing the head to have
to jump all over the disk to pick up pieces of the file, and I am hoping
THAT is the plain explanation.
If you know/think otherwise, please let me know. If I am correct,
then I have two questions.
1) I remember also reading (on this Net) a few years ago, about a PD
"boot-floopy optimizer" utility that you could run, which would
reorganize the boot disk to eliminate/minimize the back-and-forth
"grinding" effect at boottime. Does anyone else know of this utility,
and can you point me at a copy of it?
2) If there is no such animal as (1), can anyone suggest a workaround
for (cringe, cringe) HAND reorganization of the disk? Or other so-
lutions to the problem? (Example: on the old Atari 800 you could
recover certain disk-space wastage by copying all the files, one at
a time, to another disk. Is there an equivalent strategy here?)
Please e-mail as well as posting, as I have a devil of a time even GETTING
AT these groups, much less reading them with any regularity. Thanks!
Chris Chiesa
Chris_F_Chiesa@cup.portal.com
"Trying to become a knowledgeable Amigan!"jap@convex.cl.msu.edu (Joe Porkka) (04/13/91)
Chris_F_Chiesa@cup.portal.com writes: >Hello All. > Had to edit the mountlist on the floppy-I-boot-from, last night, and >now the disk seems to "grind" back and forth a lot more than it used to, >and take longer to boot. (Well, it did last night when I first DID this >editing; this morning it seemed okay. Is my mind playing tricks on me?) Your mind aint playing tricks - its our computer. What you probly did was to "Save" the file, the reboot immediatly, right? If so, then you probly forgot to wait 2-secs after the drive light goes out before rebooting - therefor the computer did not get a chance to clean up the disk (write out the sector bitmap), and so the next time the OS saw the disk (right after reboot) it had to validate the disk - as well as booting from it, causeing lots of disk seeks and a SLOW reboot. Try rebooting again, and it should be quick like your second try. >years ago that the disk could get "fragmented" causing the head to have Yes, disks can get fragmented. Its no likely that editing one file would cause a noticable difference. It could cause a slight difference if you made the file significantly larger. > 2) If there is no such animal as (1), can anyone suggest a workaround > for (cringe, cringe) HAND reorganization of the disk? Or other so- > lutions to the problem? (Example: on the old Atari 800 you could > recover certain disk-space wastage by copying all the files, one at > a time, to another disk. Is there an equivalent strategy here?) Yes this too will work, but you can do something like: copy df0: to df1: all clone to do the single-file at a time copy, but with nly one command. Assumeing that you have two floppy drives (or lots of memory, or a hard disk)
maxc1553@ucselx.sdsu.edu (InnerTangent - human1) (04/15/91)
Having struggling with diskettes for daily for the last 1.5 years, I learned
that if your disk have 0 bytes left, the amiga drive will always struggle
with it for a while until it accept the disk. It doesn't get validated or
something. So, all I can say is to delete one file.. (maybe a useless .info)
or try compressing some not-so-often used commands with powerpacker/imploder.
Then, after there are more spaces left on your disk, check your mountlist,
make sure it got saved completely. Make all the changes, then optimize
your boot disk with any good optimizers.. Bad is ok, and there are several
PD/Shareware disk optimizers around. (check ftp-sites, local BBS')
If you are completely floopy disk based Amiga, Try squeeze as much stuffs onto
your floopy as possible. Newest PowerPacker-Professional(commercial) will
let you compress most executable files. Turbo Imploder will even compress
fonts and libraries, keymaps, printer-drivers too. Saving even more space
on your bootdisk. allowing more programs to be on the same floppy.
These above are my solutions before I got my HD recently. I'm happy.
--
[unify]
*************************************************************************
* All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in the rain. +
*-----------------------------------------------------------------------+jms@tardis.Tymnet.COM (Joe Smith) (04/17/91)
In article <41207@cup.portal.com> Chris_F_Chiesa@cup.portal.com writes: > Had to edit the mountlist on the floppy-I-boot-from, last night, and >now the disk seems to "grind" back and forth a lot more than it used to, >and take longer to boot. (It's extremely full.) When a floppy is completely full, AmigaDOS does not write out the bitmap. The allows you to use the very last available block for your data. The disadvantage is that the bitmap (which tells AmigaDOS which blocks are in use and which ones are available) does not get stored. When AmigaDOS sees a floppy in this state, it knows that it has to rebuild the in-memory copy of the bitmap by locating every single file on the disk. This is the delay you see. The fix is easy. Delete an unneeded file so that the floppy has at least 1 block free. -- Joe Smith (408)922-6220 | SMTP: jms@tardis.tymnet.com or jms@gemini.tymnet.com BT Tymnet Tech Services | UUCP: ...!{ames,pyramid}!oliveb!tymix!tardis!jms PO Box 49019, MS-C51 | BIX: smithjoe | CA license plate: "POPJ P," (PDP-10) San Jose, CA 95161-9019 | humorous dislaimer: "My Amiga 3000 speaks for me."