> On Sat, Jan 09, 1999 at 01:32:02PM +0000, Christian Lavoie wrote: > > What is the best way to defrag/scan disks? > > > > Mounted disks can't be defragged, and you can't umount the root > > partition, can you?
> I don't know how to defrag a disk (you rarely need to anyway), but the > following would work, for checking as well. > Either boot up the system in `single' or `emergency' mode > (at the LILO prompt, "linux single" or "linux emergency"). emergency > in particular will mount the root read-only and enter single user mode. > (I think single will mount all file systems read-write, and still enter > single user mode.) > Or you can shutdown the running system to single user mode; > "shutdown -h now" will get you to single user mode. Then unmount partitions, > and remount the root read only with > mount -o remount,ro -n / > To get the system back to multiuser, you can either reboot, or remount > everything read/write and exit the single user shell. (I think the system > goes back to multiuser in this situation). If you forget to remount as read > write, it'll enter multiuser mode with the disk read/only, and you won't > like that. Hmmm... I've got a single ext2fs partition, so it is the root partition. That's the one I need to defrag/scan, so even having it mounted as read only won't help. (At least for the defrag) So as far as I can tell I need either: - A win95/dos based tool to defragment a linux partition (yeah right) - A floppy (or CD-ROM) based dist that won't access my HD at all. (And has the adequate tools) - Another computer with linux installed. (Forget it) - A way to boot without any root partition. But then, how does UNIX administrator were dealing with such issues? How can one scan and/or defrag a ext2fs?
