On Thu, 2005-03-17 at 20:38, Kaj Haulrich wrote: > I've just got my hands on a 160 GB external USB hard disk. > Now, this thing comes preformatted with a FAT32 (vfat) file system. > When I unmount the thing I can't reformat the drive with a decent > file system like ReiserFS, JFS, ext2 or ext3 from be it the MCC or > by hand. I can't even re-partition it with FAT32 ? > > So here it goes : will this FAT32 file system become fragmented > over time like any other Windows file system ? > > If yes, how to defrag it ? > > Or, will I have to move the FS to another drive back-and-forth in > order to defrag ? > > TIA > > Kaj Haulrich.
Kaj, The following may be interesting to you: I had a USB thumb drive preformatted with FAT32 that was doing weird things under linux. When I deleted files off it, no free space was reclaimed. After filling the disk and erasing it, it still had no space available. So I tried a format under diskdrake: it said unsupported filesystem or something. It had the filesystem as grey, but somehow it was recognised as vfat. I had to delete the filesystem, remove the mountpoint, create a new FAT32 system in the empty space (I still need to be compatible), format it again, and the thing now works like a charm. All in all, I think not all is FAT32 that appears to be so, try giving diskdrake another go. At the same time I had a browse on defrag apps for linux, and the bottom line seemed to be that linux needs defrag as much as it needs antivirus software. Hope this wasn't all useless cheers Andras
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