Defrag ?

[iank]

Trying to use Norton 6.0 on my G4 Dual Processor
running 9.2.2. I'm trying to defrag my system disk(it's new but say's it's severly fraged) I boot up from the CD, but my system hard drive is nowhere to be found. Do I need a newer version of Norton or what? Also have seen other user's wary of using Norton on the system drive, are there any good reasons for this. My system is working fine, I only use it for PT(no web or e-mail). We had everything installed by the company we bought it from. I have only added Roxio Platinum Toast. Can't see how the drive got so severly fraged"

[MusicTrax]

Originally posted by iank:I'm trying to defrag my system disk(it's new but say's it's severly fraged) I boot up from the CD, but my system hard drive is nowhere to be found. Do I need a newer version of Norton or what? Also have seen other user's wary of using Norton on the system drive, are there any good reasons for this.

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">Yeah, there are a lot of potential problems with trying to degrament the boot drive. One of them is, if you have any copy-protected programs on this drive (and I assume you do), there's always a risk that running Speed Disk will move the files around to the point where the copy-protection may get temporarily confused. This will cause you to have to call the supplier and get a new serial number or even re-install the program from scratch. This is not a problem with iLock, by the way.

I believe it's best to *only* use the boot drive to hold programs and the operating system, not session files or sound files. With that in mind, if you are encountering a lot of fragmenting on the boot drive, then do this:

1) back up the drive!

2) boot from the back-up.

3) run Norton Speed Disk (or Tech Tool or any other good defragmentizing program)

4) defrag the drive

5) boot from the original drive. All should be fine.

Note that if you really want to, you can quickly de-frag just by copying all files to a new drive. But then you'll almost definitely run into copy-protection issues, for the same reasons given above.

I have no idea why booting from Norton's own CD-ROM won't let you see the original boot drive. There are Firewire issues with 9.2, so if it's a Firewire drive, that could be one cause. But there should be no problem at all with internal IDE drives.

Note also that it's really not a big deal to have fragmenting on the boot drive in the first place. You're not accessing the drive that much that it's really an issue, at least with ProTools, assuming all your session and sound files are on other external drives.

--Marc W.

[Chief Technician]

Originally posted by MusicTrax:
Yeah, there are a lot of potential problems with trying to degrament the boot drive. One of them is, if you have any copy-protected programs on this drive (and I assume you do), there's always a risk that running Speed Disk will move the files around to the point where the copy-protection may get temporarily confused. This will cause you to have to call the supplier and get a new serial number or even re-install the program from scratch. This is not a problem with iLock, by the way.

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">This is always a possibility, but it is highly unlikely unless you are using old copy-protected software or an OS prior to 8.1. OS releases after 8.1 (the HFS+ compatible OS releases) use hidden partitions to store authorizations, and those partitions are not optimized, nor are they truly wiped by a format, which is how a formatted drive can still have authorizations (or recoverable authorizations that don't function correctly). As a side note, these partitions do get corrupted by OS X, which seems to be the main reason why Digidesign went to the iLok.

I believe it's best to *only* use the boot drive to hold programs and the operating system, not session files or sound files.

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">Using the boot drive for audio files is not a good idea.