Defraging Audio HDrive Converted Fat32 to Raw

[deanguidry]

I almost never defrag an audio drive. I just buy a new one when it gets to about 25% capacity left. There are mixed recommendations in this forum regarding whether to defrag an audio drive. My strict rule in the studio is to never do it. However, I had a 'tech" guy in the studio a few weeks ago to trouble shoot a registry corruption issue which he repaired, but he also thought that defraging the audio drive would be of benefit, and, unfortuneately, my studio business partner ok'd it without confering with me first. Well, the next time we fired up the system, there appeared an error message indicating that the audio dirve was "not a windows xp" drive and could not be recognized. It populated as a drive but when you clicked on it for properties or to expand it, the system froze. My tech guy assured me that he had not reformatted the drive. We later discoverd that the drive format had been converted from Fat32 to Raw.

Does digidesign recommend defraging an audio drive? And, has anyone had his file format convert from Fat32 to Raw after defraging, or after any other procedure or malfunction?

We managed to retrieve all the files after $200 dollars of tech support and a new hard drive on which to transfer the files. I know, I should have had a backup. I did further research and found out that it might have had something to do with the drives boot system defect or something call MRP or MPR (not sure if that's even right). The fix for this was to repair the hard drives boot system, but my tech instead just used a program I purchased for the purpose of recovering files.

I always understood that because of the tolerances envolved in multi track audio playback and recording, defragging a drive mignt do more harm than good because it would affect syncronization, particulary with large track counts. Also, I can recall a time or two in the past that when I defragged an audio drive, it resulted in pro tools having to re-link audio files.

Anyone care to discuss. Digi Support?