[Sluglug] Partition Question

[cerise at armory.com]

Hi Erich:

Awesome!  Another Gentoo user!  I run ~x86, ~sparc32, and ~alpha 8)

The "non-contiguous" bit isn't actually an error, that's just informational.
It's typical that as a disk becomes more full, you'll have an increasing
number of non-contiguous files.  As a result, it's typical for /boot to be
very fragmented.  Since it's very infrequent use, this is normally OK.

mv'ing files as you point out would work to defragment a disk for a little
while, but if you have that sort of disk space, you'll have a very small
amount of non-contiguous files.  Even then, it'll only last for a short
while.

The unclean mount warnings used to be something to be concerned about, but
in this age of journalled filesystems, your disk is almost assured of coming
back up in a clean state.  The journal will get played back on mount and
the filesystem will know which writes got done and which didn't get done.

Of course, on ext2 (a non journalled filesystem), it's a concern.  You'll
want to fsck -t ext2 hda1 whenever you get that error there.

-Phil/CERisE

On Mon, Oct 03, 2005 at 02:22:06PM -0700, Erich wrote:
> Greetings! I, too, am a Freshman here at UCSC - Bioinformatics major. I've
> been running Gentoo (amd64~) for almost a year now, but have started to
> acrue quite a few "Error: disk hda3 uncleanly mounted. Non-contigous files:
> 3.5%" errors. That's nowhere near a direct quote, but I think you get the
> idea.
>
> So that's got me wondering - though I use all ext3 (journaling enabled)
> partition schemes (except for /boot {hda1}, which is ext2), I'm getting
> fragmentation issues. I looked around for a defrag utility, but the only
> thing I could find was a some mail list that said that if you had enough
> space on your disk, you could: (as root)
> 
> mkdir /bak
> cp -r /* /bak/   (not sure if -r is needed)
> mv -r /bak/* /   (same)
> 
> That seemed so incredibly dangerous that I didn't even think about doing it.
> Also, I should note that that error doesn't always show up (the
> non-contiguous error). So here're my questions: 1) What exactly is going on
> here? 2) Do I need to fix it? 3) How?
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> ~Erich Blume
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Sluglug mailing list
> Sluglug at sluglug.ucsc.edu
> http://sluglug.ucsc.edu/mailman/listinfo/sluglug