> What you can do is boot from your "rescue" disk, mount your linux partition
> and then run "e2fsck" and it'll "defrag" your system... although it sort of
> does that automagically at boot. It checks for how badly fragmented
> (non-contiguous) your file system is and then when Linux decides it's too
> badly "fragmented" (i.e. "non-contiguous") it will auto-run e2fsck and fix
> your file system so that it's more contiguous.
Are you sure about that? e2fsck simply checks and repairs file systems.
e2fsck's man page doesn't say a thing about defragging.
The running of e2fsck at boot is set by a flag which can be specifically
set using the tune2fs utility. This flag simply invokes e2fsck to check the
partition after X number of mounts just to ensure the file system is in
order.
Regarding defragmentation, I was under the impression (warning: this
could be wrong!) that like file systems such as OS/2's HPFS, ext2 file
systems simply use a bit of logic when writing out files and thus avoids
most fragmentation problems. This contrasts to Microsoft's FAT file system
which starts writing a file at the first byte of open disk space whether
that space is large enough for the file or not.
There exists an ext2 defrag utility, it's packaged for the Debian
GNU/Linux distribution, but most people opt to not use the utility as it is
largely unneeded and can cause some problems.
--
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. | *any* distribution, rock solid reliability, quality control,
Randy | seamless upgrades via ftp or CD-ROM, strict filesystem layout
| and adherence to standards, and militantly 100% FREE Linux!
