Defrag Win98 partition C from Win2000 Defrag on D

[derng]

I asked about this some time ago and the best that anyone could suggest was
to defrag the Win98 partition only when booted to Win98.

Drive C is Windows 98, Windows 2000 is on D. I know there are the boot files
which should not be moved on C and in Windows 98 Defrag these files
apparently are marked System files and are not moved. Can C be defragged
from within Windows 2000? It doesn't look like any files are green/System on
C in the Analysis. There is no way to specifically mark files in Windows
Defrag the way for instance can be done in Norton SpeedDisk.

I suppose I could ghost an image of C and then test it, but has anyone
defragged C (a FAT32 partition - Windows 98) on a dual boot system when
booted to Windows 2000? Will it leave the boot files unmoved?

 

[Richard Harris]

These files should not be touched when doing a defrag as you correctly
pointed out they are system files, and defrag ignores them.

Rich

 

[Greg Hayes/Raxco Software]

The green "system files" that the built-in defragmenter displays are for
NTFS partitions - the "green" are $MFT and related metadata - things that
are not found with the FATx file system.

I would strongly suggest only defragmenting the Win98 partition from within
Win98.

- Greg/Raxco Software
Microsoft MVP - Windows Storage Management/File System

Disclaimer: I work for Raxco Software, the maker of PerfectDisk - a
commercial defrag utility, as a systems engineer in the support department.

 

[derng]

"Strongly suggest" does not imply any specific knowledge but rather some
vague idea about what exactly will or will not happen.

I did run defrag on C - Win98 from within D - Win2000 and the machine still
booted. I suspect that the boot loader files are recognized as 'system
files' regardless of what drive they are on since they are always on the
first partition of the first drive.

What surprised me was that reinstalling Windows 98 it did not blow away my
boot.ini and the ability to boot to the other O/Ses.

 

[Greg Hayes/Raxco Software]

Defrag process in Win98 and Win2k is handled differently. Win98 uses APPLOG
info to place frequently accessed files at the beginning of the logical
drive. Win2k defragmenter doesn't do this. Win2k has no idea if there are
any files on the Win98 partition that should't be "moved" and no concept of
what files on the Win98 partition are "system" files, etc...

- Greg/Raxco Software
Microsoft MVP - Windows Storage Management/File System

Disclaimer: I work for Raxco Software, the maker of PerfectDisk - a
commercial defrag utility, as a systems engineer in the support department.

 

[derng]

Doesn't every Windows O/S know where the ntldr/ntdetect.com are? These are
required by all of them to boot regardless of what partition they are on. In
this case it did not move them, are you suggesting that it is only by
accident that it did not choose to move them? Perhaps defrag does have these
files on a sort of permanent 'do not move' list.

Regarding applog, that is interesting but I am not using win98 for much
anyway. In any case, if defrag is good enough without using applog in 2000
why would it be that important in 98? Just allowing it to move the files the
same way it does in 2000 might be acceptable.