Re:A FAT32 fragmenter
by upperclasstwit on Thursday September 10, 2015 @01:01AM
(#10196207)
That was such a pure pleasure. I can't exactly picture it but I remember it was sort of like watching your dwarf fortress.
My favorite ones would show you a grid representing all the clusters on the disk. You would see an open block for free space and a solid block for allocated space.
Then it would highlight a span of blocks to indicate reading.
Finally it would write those clusters elsewhere, indicating so with a different color.
Edit: Uhh.. and HN deleted my diagrams. See http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=nKHddiKe
For your enjoyment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPv1gQ5Rs8A
Neat. I had one for DOS too that would go left-to-right instead of top-to-bottom, but I don't remember if it was a Norton tool or something else. It was mesmerizing to me as a kid to watch data moving around on the hard drive and the computer magically getting faster.
Norton Speed Disk? http://virtuallyfun.superglobalmegacorp.com/wordpress/wp-con...
Re:A FAT32 fragmenter
by TazeTSchnitzel on Thursday September 10, 2015 @03:08PM
(#10199915)
The Windows 95 Defragmenter was probably based on this, since it has a Symantec copyright alongside Microsoft's.
Agreed, very soothing and hypnotic to watch!
You can get graphical defragers today...
Defraggler is the only one I can think of off the top of my head. I love that kind of interactivity in applications, so much better than a loading bar.
My first thought as well, but apparently there is another one.
http://ultradefrag.sourceforge.net/en/index.html
Seems it even offers a terminal interface for the real nostalgic kick.
I tested it on floppy disks - if you let it run for a while, the remaining free space was so fragmented it was almost unusable. You could hear the poor floppy drive seeking like crazy just to open a tiny text file.
The fun part was defragmenting it afterwards - I miss the days of the graphical defrag that Norton and MS had.