Defragmenting Windows on a dual-boot system?

[Kniggit]

I've searched all over the internet for the answer to this question, but I can't seem to get a straight answer. So here goes...

I have an 80GB hard drive with the partitions set up like this:

C: FAT32 (Windows)
D: FAT32
E: FAT32 (Win swap)
ext2 (Linux swap)
ReiserFS (Linux)

I partitioned my drive like this from the very beginning, so no FAT32 part's have been moved or resized, ever. My Windows part's have gotten badly fragmented, and I want to defragment them. Can I do this without ruining my partition table(s)?

I tried this once on another drive, and my drive D disappeared, and Linux got completely thrashed. Then again, I had repartitioned my hard drive, so Windows may have been reading the disk sizes wrong in that case. I've heard of this happening to at least one other person, and they had also repartitioned in order to install Linux. Is repartitioning what makes Windows defrag go apeshit, or am I stuck either way? I'm axious to hear your opinions on this.

Thanks.

[kkubasik]

its a very tricky deal, namely because windows defragmenter refuses to belive that other FS's exist. You can try, but backing essental data up is a good idea. then a program like qtparted for linux and partitonmagic for windows will make life much simpler. Honestly some people have had sucess others haven's i dont know what makes or breaks it, but best of luck to you.

[Kniggit]

Honestly some people have had sucess others haven's i dont know what makes or breaks it, but best of luck to you.

Hmm, well that doesn't surprise me. It doesn't seem like anyone knows for sure.

BTW, here's a link to a mailing list with two other users who suffered the same problem as I did: http://lists.suse.com/archive/suse-l...-Apr/0604.html

The really interesting part is where Michael Lankton says Windows was misreporting the size of drive C. I suspect that he used his Linux installer for repartitioning the drive, and Windows was somehow left out of the loop, so to speak. Windows defrag may have thought the 1GB still belonged to drive C, and tried to defragment it. It doesn't take a lot of imagination to see how that would really fudge up Linux.

It seems like there's no concensus on what causes the partition tables to be corrupted. If we could get some people to post their experiences with dual-boot defragging, we'd be that much closer to a fix. Please, if anyone has done this, could you tell me whether it worked or not, what program you used, and how you installed Linux? I'd really appreciate it.

[justwes]

I've got dual boot on my laptop and on my desktop with XP/SuSE and I've had no issues with defragging XP.

However, I don't use the one built in XP. I've got Norton System Works and use their Speed Disk (which is just a fany way of saying defrag).

[Kniggit]

That's great to hear... Did you resize your XP drive when you installed SuSE? Cause that would mean Windows defrag is probably at fault...

[justwes]

That's great to hear... Did you resize your XP drive when you installed SuSE? Cause that would mean Windows defrag is probably at fault...

On my laptop I have a 30gb drive. I started with a clean isntall of XP.

I then resized it down to 20gb, and reformated the remaining 10gb to ext3 and 1gb of that for swap space. I used Partition Magic 8 for the resizing and formating.

Then booted from my SuSE dvd and installed it to the ext3 parition, of course reformating it to reiser.

pretty much the same thing with my desktop system as well, except SuSE is installed on a seperate drive from Windows.

But the drive that I have Linux on is shared with a fat32 and a few NTFS partitions.

[Kniggit]

Doh. I was assuming you used the distro's tools, but since you're using third party apps for both defragging AND partitioning, we can't rule anything out yet. I can't speak for those poor guys on the SuSE mailing list, but when my system went bad I had used Mandrake's built-in partitioner and Windows defrag...

At least we know that PM + Norton Speed Disk works, so we're getting somewhere. Thanks, that helps.

Keep 'em coming people!