How to clean up a hard drive

  • Thread starter Thread starter sonusman
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sonusman

sonusman

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I believe that once you delete all the files on a partition then empty the waste basket, you will not have any problems with the partition fragging files. If you do go the format route, just do a "Quick Format" as that removes any file tags and what not. A full format is not really necessary and will take a lot longer.

Ed
 
I assume you have two hard drives and using
your large one that is partitoned. Make a seperate directory called music or whatever
on the partition that you use to record.
then when your done with the song and have
everything backed up just delete all the files in that directory. No need to format
at all. Once you delete the files its ready
to go. Just make sure you work in that directory. Formatting takes longer than a simple delete.
DuckHead
 
I have been seeing posts and searching for ways to make my hard drives work better as I go along. I've had this computer for about 3 months now. Learning about computers the hard way when I do something to it before asking someone first. One 10G drive, and one 20G drive (this one has NT and ntracks on it, partitioned for audio storage as well). I can't believe how much one song will take up on a drive, anyway, when I get rid of audio files on a partition do I just delete them, or should some other things be done to the partition to help it get ready for the next audio files to be put there. Ntracks uses the hard drive when I'm recording, so I want to make the partition nice and ready and rarin' to go for my next project.
I've heard of defragging and formatting. If I do these things to a certain partition of my drive, does it destroy all the data in that partition? Does it help to do these things? Can I format and defrag just a partition, or does it do these things to the whole hard drive?
Thanks for any help.
bobbo
 
If you've got a separate partition for just audio files and you've backed up (and tested same) what you want to save, formatting the partition is the quick way to restore that space to factory condition.
But you BETTER MOVE CAREFULLY when you do this. Format the wrong partition and you've got a lot of work ahead of you just to get your computer back to where it was.
Defragging is a much longer process. This copies your entire HD into a RAM buffer a little at a time and rewrites it so that subsequent access of any file will be sequential instead of willy-nilly. This sometimes actually speeds things up. But no more than an empty freshly formatted drive.
And don't forget to empty the recycle bin.

[This message has been edited by drstawl (edited 02-05-2000).]
 
Thanks for the explaining drstawl. I've got room for about 7 or so of those little 2G FAT partitions, I'll just designate a song for each and when I'm through with a song, make some audio data CDRs of it, then format that partition. That sounds like it would work out real good.
See ya.
bobbo
 
There is little need to be concerned with file fragmentation or the like with digital audio. I am 100% convinced of that. ESPECIALLY if you record more than one track at a time, in which case fragmentation is good. We're talking of 30 to 50MB+ files here.

As duck said, using partitions to organize files is really silly. Directories (folders) allow you to create an orgainization structure to any depth, and you choose to go in the other direction?
Maybe you should just create directories called "C-Drive, D-Drive", etc and pretend
that they're partitions.

And recall that adding more partitions can actually slow down performance as their are
more tables to search...though by how much I'm not sure. Plus it sounds like you're planning on using FAT16 partitions in which case you will be losing out on some performance at 2GB.

I would at a minimum AND maximum stick your operating system itself on a seperate partition. This makes it REALLY easy to reinstall. Anything more than that is overkill.

Slackmaster 2000
 
I don't really know any other way to go though. The first partition is FAT and it has just NT and ntracks on it. The rest of the 18G I want to be audio files. I tried making it all NTFS, but for some reason I am getting some disk errors when I do that with partition magic. I've tried it a few times, and figure that it might not be a good idea to be using a drive that the computer is telling me it has errors on it. So I went for making a bunch of 2G partitions of FAT. The people who put together my computer for me put a program in called winternals that I thought was supposed to have made it possible for me to use a FAT32 partition instead, but when I tried formatting to FAT32 in partition magic it wouldn't let me. I'd love to use FAT32 instead of all those FAT partitions and just make song folders, but it wouldn't seem to work before for me and I really wanted to record a song for homerecording.comp. The song is done and stored on CD, I can now do anything to that extra 18G of space now.
Give me some suggestions anyone, OK? I can then test to see if ntracks works better with a different setup.
Thanks
bobbo
 
Slackmaster,
How about this theory? You know in ntracks in the preference/paths section, where you put the drive that ntracks is working in. I assign that to a 2G FAT partition (the song I am working on for instance). Wouldn't that tell ntracks where it has to search for the files? I'm not really sure if it does, but if it does, wouldn't that be better to have a small 2G partition that is designated in ntracks in that paths section, than one real big partition where it has to search through all your other files?
I may be all wrong about this, but just a question.
thanks
bobbo
 
I still assume you have 2 seperate hard drives and your using a dual 95/98 and nt
os. If your primary drive has 95/98 and your
2nd drive has nt, winternal says not to do this.
For maximum compatibility in dual boot systems, the recommended partition configuration is to maintain a FAT partition as the first partition on the primary drive. This partition should contain Windows 95/98 as well as Windows NT and should not be used to store applications or data files. The rest of the primary disk and any other disks should be formatted with FAT32.
I dont know your setup but this might help.
DuckHead
 
Bobbo,

I can send you a link to some FAT32 driver for windows.

I currently have NT on my primary 1GB FAT16 partition, then 98 on the remaining 9GB FAT32 partition. With the FAT32 drivers, NT is able to see the big FAT32 partition, which I also use for my audio files (NT doesn't know that 98 is also installed there and doesn't care).

I didn't realize that you are trying to run a dual boot setup off of a single HD. It certainly does make things much harder!

If you want those drivers let me know. Works GREAT for me! I was *this* close to creating a bunch of silly FAT16 partitions myself :)

Slackmaster 2000
 
I appreciate you guys putting up with my questions on this. I do have 2 hard drives. One is a 10G drive, it has a FAT partition with windows 98 and internet on it and the other 8G partition has FAT32 for photos, word, excel etc.
The other drive is a 20G drive, with FAT partition that has NT and ntracks on it. The remaining 2G FAT partitions cover the rest of that drive for audio files.
Do you think I should just start from scratch and put NT on that FAT partition with 98, and then make that whole 20G drive FAT32? I don't have much of anything on the computer, so I don't think I would be losing much.
Slackmaster 2000: Yes I would like those FAT32 drivers. I remembered you gave out a site for them and I looked for them, but wasn't able to locate them. I would like to give it another try. Thanks.
Sounds like I might have things a little backwards on my computer.
Would you think it would be best if I were to: Leave things the way they are, but install the FAT32 drivers on the 20G drive to make the FAT audio storage partitions into one FAT32 partition.
Or: Put NT and 98 on a FAT partition on the 10G and everything else FAT32.
Thanks for the help everyone.
bobbo
 
Nah, since you have two hard drives, just use one for 98 and one for NT. Format the NT drive with NTFS instead of FAT. It'll be real easy.

Slackmaster 2000
 
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