Fragmentation

[Guest]

A volume on my W2K server is heavily fragmented. I ran the built-in disk
defragmenter, but it does not defragment the disk. Disk defragmenter needs
15 percent free space to work effectively, but the disk only has 3 percent
free space. I uninstalled all unneeded applications and ran a disk cleanup.
I tried third-party utilities with no luck. Is there a way to gain enough
disk space to defragment the disk?

 

[Galen]

In alexo <[email protected]> had this to say:

My reply is at the bottom of your sent message:

A volume on my W2K server is heavily fragmented. I ran the built-in
disk defragmenter, but it does not defragment the disk. Disk
defragmenter needs 15 percent free space to work effectively, but the
disk only has 3 percent free space. I uninstalled all unneeded
applications and ran a disk cleanup. I tried third-party utilities
with no luck. Is there a way to gain enough disk space to defragment
the disk?

I'd root around on the drive to find things that you do not need and delete
them or burn them to CD (or copy to another drive) and then delete them.
Having that little free disk space is also likely to slow down performance.
As for what you need and don't need, well, that's up to you but there's temp
files that can probably be killed. Start > Run > %temp% > and start deleting
random stuff. (Really, you can delete anything in there without any
problems.) There's loads of files you don't need and there's probably old
applications (several years worth of versions if you're at all like me) that
you will never install again. It's nice to hold on to them but you really
don't need them probably. I hold on to everything but usually I burn it to
CD, copy it to a PC over the network that does nothing but store files, or
place it on one of the additional drives inside the box I'm using.

Galen
--

"But there are always some lunatics about. It would be a dull world
without them."

Sherlock Holmes

 

[j9]

You could temporarily shut off the virtual memory and delete the *.swp file.
That would get you up to 4gig of space (if the virtual memory is configured
even remotely correctly). If you have to, install another hard drive to be
the virtual memory (not recommended, as that really screws up your dump log
system if the swap is moved from the boot drive).

You'll also want to delete any unused profiles on the server. I would bet
that quite a few user profiles are excessively large (found 1 here today
that was nearly a gig -- no wonder it took 30 minutes to log in for her).
If this is a file server, assign some quotas.

 

[pscyime]

Hi

I always thought and am sure have read it is better to have the swap file on a separate drive , did i miss a meeting!!

Regards

S

 

[Dan Seur]

In a perfect world the pagefile, which is ALWAYS used by
W2k no matter what, would be

- the only file, on
- the only volume (partition), on
- a very fast hard drive attached to
- an otherwise unused controller.

This would alleviate all sorts of resource contention
(file read/write waits) that slows the system down by
queueing resource usage calls.

In the real world this isn't usually a practical situation.

But the closer you can get to it the better off you are.

So look for the least busy hard drive on the least busy
controller, think about which partition thereon will
accommodate the pagefile with the SHORTEST average
seek movement (it may be the busiest partition), and
stick the pagefile on that partition.

I believe a user on a standalone machine will almost never
see any obvious performance improvement as long as
the pagefile is not badly fragmented and its partition is
not nearly full. Serious gamers maybe, and serious CPU-
intensive folks maybe, but not John Q. Wordprocessor.

 

[Guest]

First off you can not run Windows 2000 without a pagefile. It's minimum is
20megs.

When speaking of paging you have to separate between workstation and server.
Average workstation is best left alone as system managed. Servers on the
other hand should always be planned with maximizing pagefile operations.

Unless you are dumping and know how to read dumps configuring your server
system around the chance that you may use the dump file is of the utmost
ignorance. I have worked with dumps and they never solved my issues. I
haven't configured a server around a crash dump in 7 years. I always move
the pagefile completely off c: disk and put it somewhere else.

But this isn't going to address Alexo's disk space issue. Be aware a
severely fragmented volume can render your server unmountable and
unrecoverable.

Alexo you didn't plan your disk capacity in advance and now you understand
the importance of doing so. You have two options;
1. add a disk. Move the pagefile, uninstall/reinstall apps or whatever you
can move to the new disk so you can defragment.
2. use Ghost or other clone software. buy a second much larger disk. set
your volume to basic since that is the only way you can clone. Clone from
this disk to the new one. You can expand the clone to the size of the new
disk. Replace the old disk with the new one and boot up. Set to dynamic and
you are done.

Planning is always better then when its a crisis. Best of luck!