Re: Disk Defragmentatio

[Urs Thuermann <urs@isnogud.escape.de>]

> I know that, but I'm running a pair of debian etch boxes over vmware,
> and the disk images have grown to almost tripple the size of the
> actual installation. I want to reclaim the 3+ GBs on the partition
> (I'm running a bit short on disk space), and in order for the vmware
> utility to compact the image, I need to defrag the filesystem first.

I don't know what vmware does to provide a file system to your debian
guest.  But I'm pretty sure there is no need to defragment your file
system.  What type of file system do you use?  ext2/3, reiserfs, xfs,
...?

>From what you write, I think you want to resize your file system in
order to be able to free part of the underlying file/block device in
the host.  I case you have ext2 or ext3 you need to fsck the FS first,
then resize2fs(8).  resize2fs is part of the e2fsprogs package.  The
other file systems have similar tools.


urs