Re: Newbie: How do I defrag my (FAT) drive?

[Hendrik Boom <hendrik@pooq.com>]

On Tue, Aug 23, 2005 at 05:49:58PM +0200, Tim Ruehsen wrote:
> 
> > You don't need to.  You only need to defragment your disk if your
> > operating system is incapable of keeping the fragmentation under
> > control, and Linux does not suffer from this problem.
> 
> Many people say so, but it is not true.
> 
> Ext2 takes some precautions to reduce fragmentation a bit (in comparison with 
> (V)FAT), but ext2 can't prevent it. And it is not a feature of 'Linux' it is 
> a feature of the filesystem.

While we're on the subject, how *do* you defragment an MSDOS file system
when you're running Linux.  I'm faced with a MSDOS-formatted USB drive
that is used to ferry data to a plugin for a Nintendo DS that
requires each file to be contiguous.

-- hendrik