Defrag the drive, not just the directory

[drguitar]

I use disk warrior constantly on all of my drives and it has been a great tool and a life saver. But it only defrags the directory, not all the actual data on the drive. Eventually, some hard drives still mount and seem to work fine, but they will not play pro tools sessions anymore. The sessions open and all the waveforms are grayed out and it says the volume is unsuitable for playback. And disk warrior will then defrag the directory but it does not fix the pro tools playback problem. When I have come to this problem, I have always backed up the entire drive, zeroed it, and copied the files back onto it. and of course, this works.

but alas I no longer wish to do this and am hearing things here and there about techtool pro being able to defrag.

I have not used it and have only used disk warrior this past year or so because I had heard conflicting things about different mac utility programs abilities to defrag drives and do a truly good job of it. Most people even at mac stores had told me this year that no utility truly defrags well and that disk warrior is the best to use. But now I've heard some people say to use techtool to defrag.

I'm just wondering if anyone regularly has had success using techtool pro or any other mac defragging utility to defrag pro tools drives when disk warrior does not fix the "unsuitable for playback" problem.

thank you

[Randirainbow]

Uh! Rebuild the permissions first,

[QUOTE]
Try this! When you hear the chord on startup, hold down the command key while also holding down the s key. When you see the black and white screen appear let go of the keys. After the machine does it's thing you will have a small white box at the end of the dialog all in black and white. This is your command line interface for linux. Carefully type fsck -fy (eff ess see kay space minus eff why) then hit your return key and sit back while your hard drive fixes itself. This is a weekly routine for all of my boxes and has never let me down. When it finishes, you will have a dialog that says either "disk was modified" or the "drive appears to be ok". If the drive was modified, type fsck -fy again as many times as it takes untill you get "the drive appears to be ok". At that point type "reboot" in the little box and hit the return key again. Your machine will boot up. Hopefully your box will now be good to go.

[maccool]

provided that you have the hardware available to do it, your current method of backup-wipe clean-restore has to be the best and fastest solution. How full are the drives in question?

[drguitar]

First off, repairing permissions is very useful for OS maintenance, but will not fix a fragmented drive so that pro tools thinks it is a suitable playback volume.

Also, the linux commands recommendation doesn't sound like it has a way of distinguishing between the internal drive and external drives. The drive that is fragmented is a firewire drive. Besides, I'd rather not delve into linux code that I don't fully understand.

So once again, anyone use Techtool Pro 4 or other utilities with success to defrag a drive and not just the directory? thanks

[drguitar]

.....bump, SOMEone out there must have some insight on this

[Michael Cottrell]

Linux.... What are you guys talking about? Isn't it UNIX?

[drguitar]

linux, unix, blaaaaaahhhh, who cares

TECHTOOL PRO 4 AND DEFRAGGING!!!!! that's what this post subj is

[alance]

Tech tool pro will defrag drives, set up an emergency boot partition, as well as many other tests... It has been the only one to be able to resurrect a firewire drive that couldn't be mounted. (yes I tried drive 10, disk warrior and disk utility) I dig it and haven't had a single fw drive problem since I started using it, where I've been plagued with problems prior to getting it.