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Re: Vmware workstation crashed today

__/ [Aragorn] on Wednesday 08 February 2006 22:35 \__

> On Wednesday 08 February 2006 22:46, Erik Funkenbusch stood up and spoke
> the following words to the masses in /comp.os.linux.advocacy...:/
> 
>> On Wed, 08 Feb 2006 19:43:13 +0000, Roy Schestowitz wrote:
>> 
>>> I remember defragmenting my hard-drive every night to earn some
>>> space. I had only 170 MB at the time and was running MS-DOS.
>>> Evidently, filesystems from Microsoft still suffer from deficiencies
>>> that have not been addressed.
>> 
>> Then you remember wrong.  Of course this is no surprise given your
>> comments about MS detecting FF as spyware (a known hoax) and Microsoft
>> buying Bonzai buddy (again, something that didn't happen).
>> Defragmenting cannot give you more space.  All defragmenting does is
>> move allocated sectors around on the disk to create a linear access.
>> 
>> What you probably remember (poorly) is repartitioning FAT partitions
>> to reduce cluster size.  That would give you more space, but
>> defragmenting would not.
> 
> It is quite possible that defragmenting *did* give him more space,
> because the NTFS master file table can get fragmented, and possibly
> corrupted in some way.
> 
> Apparently, it's quite easy for the NTFS MFT to get corrupted, or so I
> hear.

To address the point made by Larry and Erik, DOS utilities that I was using
involved a combination of steps, one of which was defragmentation. A
defragmentation stage did not earn *much* space, but at that stage, even 4
MB re-gained were enough to make me *very* happy.

There were steps that preceded defragmentation, but I can't recall their
description. Other stages involved checking the FAT and I frequently used
tools like ndd.exe (Norton Disk Doctor). What a total waste of time! The FAT
was so brittle whereas with Linux, the FS becomes a total bore.

My memory of this is vague and comprehension of the whole process is poor in
retrospect. I was about 11 or 12 at the time. The rise of DOS and Windows
must have been a total scam, which I was too young to fully understand. I
wish my parents and school raised me on a decent O/S. Then again, Linux
makes people stupid. It gives no troubleshooting experience and resilience
is soon taken for granted -- a recipe for disaster if one even devolves into
a corporate environment which relies on Windows infrastructures.

Roy

-- 
Roy S. Schestowitz      |    "In hell, treason is the work of angels"
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