On Sun, 2003-09-07 at 00:00, James Nickerson wrote:
> I've had some issues recently with my Mandrake 9.1 installation that caused it 
> to lock up a few times, and upon restarting a couple times I had it "check 
> the file system integrity."  It goes through my home partition and then says 
> I have a percent or two of "non-contiguous blocks", but that it still 
> [PASSED].  Same deal, of course, from fsck.

Non-contiguous block percentage is basically how fragmented your drive
is.  ext2/3 and most inode systems are quite resistant to
fragmentation.  I've operated a partition for a year or more and never
exceeded 5%.  I've seen windows drives (fat32) that were 35% or more
fragmented.

>       My question is whether "passed" is as good as it can be, or if it just past 
> by whatever possibly slim margin.  But mainly my question is, what precisely 
> are non-continous blocks, and how bad are they?  Web searching seems to 
> indicate that they're just some fragmented files, which seems to fit the 
> name, but if that's the case why does the system seem so concerned with them, 
> and how come it normally seems to be at 0%?  Aren't dos filesystems chock 
> full of "non-contiguous blocks" without anyone batting an eye, except to 
> defrag occasionally?

Passed simply means your data is okay and the drive is consistant.  The
non-contigous stuff is how fragmented your drive is.  By the way, I
think there is a defragmenter for linux but I've never known what it was
called or had to use it.


Michael


> 
>  -James
> 
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