Hello all;
I spent the day trying to copy data from a set of 80Gb drives
onto a set of new 250Gb drives (actually Hitachi Deskstars )
I've found that :
W2K doesn't like the drive in Manage - too big when it's totally
unpartitioned
Used XP CD to do initial format of 20Gb Primary and the rest as extended,
with a 16Mb FAT at the end of the extended partition
I Read somewhere that some partition managers have problems if last
partition on drive is NTFS - and since I started doing that I have has fewer
complaints of partition tables being corrupted - and what's 16Mb out of
250Gb
Used 2K Manage to create 4 partitions 55GB NTFS -
and hide the little FAT partition, and the 20GB
(The 20GB one will get a backup copy of their OS - which will also be
hidden)
512 byte allocation units - 'cos there's loads of small files
Having created the first lot I forgot to turn off indexing for all
subdirectories
copied data over and found that about 30% of the drive space was reserved
for system use
Turned indexing off - and couldn't recover the space - not even the cmd -
del \\**\c: (trick)
Quick format the partition
turn off indexing all subdirectories as well
create a directory and put about 300Mb tmp into it
created a directory 'A'
copied data from source partition into A
deleted the tmp files created earlier
emptied the recycle bin
created a set of the main directories in the root directory
'moved' the stuff from A into the root directory
Recreate the tmp files created earlier to keep the space for next time I get
at these drives - possibly with another 20,000 files
Now all major directories are at the start of the drive, and almost not
fragmented
and those directories are sorted
( about 8,000 files in each - and there's about 5 of them)
There's no point in indexing their content as the user(s) access them via
links in a database, usually examining the contents of a similarly names
group
so their access will be clustered - both the directory, and the data
Boy will the new drives make their systems fly compared to the old
unclustered, and fragmented directory systems
I'll have to dig out the version of speedisk that would just defrag, sort
and cluster directories at the start of the drive .
---------------
Moral of the above ( all of which I have to check ) seems to be -
Don't Index on NTFS unless you want to waste space
( I have still to check that not indexing didn't get space reserved - If
that didn't work, then it's probably a case of FAT32, copy in the files, and
re-structure as NTFS, when there isn't enough space for the OS to acquire
the index space)
Beware of 250GB drives unless you have XP, or a partition manager.
--------------
You can manually arrange data for efficient directory locations -
providing the partitions are relatively small enough to copy to space on
your system
(The 8,000 file limit is because many applications and utilities (well those
they use) cannot handle directories much larger than 10,000 files with the
name forms (length) they use)
JimB
Back to another partition - MD5 hashing - then the copy process, then MD5
the result and use Excel to compare the 2 MD5 sets - proving the new
partition is a match to the old one.
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