On Sun, 22 Oct 2000, you wrote:
> Well, in normal mode, defrag manages to complain that something is
> writing to the hard drive every few minutes for the first 30
> minutes of a defrag and sometimes gets nowhere even when nothing
> is in startup
This hints of a hardware problem and/or misconfiguration. It's
time that you post your hardware/vendor, and if it's ready made,
whether you're using a different version/upgrade/config of Winblows
than what that vendor shipped. Very often even the better known
ready mades will only satisfactorily run the OS (and version of) as
shipped. Also, does you're system use a 'shim', usually a HDD
manufacturers' software or ready made vendor fix for a
deficient/dated bios/hardware (motherboard) situation. You'll see
evidence of this during boot (eg, EZBIOS is one of the more common
ones).
, or in load= and run= in win.ini or in the Run* keys
> of the registry or anything being in autoexec.bat and there are no
> viruses on this system and thus going into safe mode doesn't load
> anything that could interfere with the operation of defrag.
I also question why t'heck Safemode is necessary. A MUCH better
solution would be to boot DOS only (_NOT_ Safemode, DosMode, or the
<F8> on boot option). AFAIK (I was a Win$ux beta tester in '95,
thru '98), the _only_ way to do this, and according to M$, is to
edit MSDOS.SYS to reflect BootGUI=0. Any other solution will boot
WinBlows with Windoze overhead present. If you want to experiment my
premise, save this (below) in a text file and save as 'report.bat'
Then run it from a DOS prompt.
rem REPORT.BAT
@ECHO OFF
C:\BAT\MSD /P COMPUTER.$$$ (see below **)
C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND\EDIT COMPUTER.$$$
DEL COMPUTER.$$$
CLS
** If your Windoze version did'nt come with MSD.EXE, you can get
it readily from a ftp search. You can see from my batch file above
that I keep both MSD (and my batch files) in C:\bat. You'll need to
change this line if you differ.
Only in the senario I propose above will Win$ux overhead NOT be
present, and MSD.EXE will report this (takes several minutes, 25+
pages). I run Win$ux this way normally (to fly airplanes), and
also to run DOS 6.22 and older programs (eg, DOSSHELL). Very often
I run 'scandisk' followed by 'scanreg /fix' followed by 'scanreg
/opt' from the PURE DOS 7.1 prompt I boot to (BootGUI=0). This
keeps the registry preened, cleaned and compressed. I also run
DEFRAG regularly (including my drive that has Mandrake on it).
Keeping the registry maintained and the Win$ux file systems clean is
the only chance Winblows has at acting like a proper OS, at least on
quality hardware ;>
I suspect your problems with DEFRAG are that you've got
screwed up partitions, prob'ly an overlap. Please also post the
results of (as root) 'fdisk -l' from a Linux console prompt. There
should be no /hdxx partitions that end with, and other /hdxx
partitions that begin with the same cylinder number.
The solution (IMNSHO) is to never use third party partioning
tools as is most often suggested (like Partition Magic). I never
have, and I've never had any disk problems. My advice is to use DOS
'fdisk' to create DOS partitions, and Linux tools ('fdisk') to
make/convert DOS to ext2 partitions. IOW's, use DOS fdisk to
partition a drive that M$ and Linux will coexist on, then use Linux
tools ('specially Mandrake's very capable DiskDrake during install)
to make the partitioned space suitable for Linux.
'Course, if you do have overlapping partitions, that also points
to marginal config/hardware. Sorry, I suspect it's a ready made and
you don't wanna hear that ;> In any event, it's NOT a Linux problem.
--
Tom Brinkman [EMAIL PROTECTED] Galveston Bay
