# Can you De-Fragment The Hard Drive?



## ctznkne (Jan 7, 2006)

My System has bogged down terribly... It takes 30 seconds to change from TV to Menu... I was told the Drive is WAY too fragmented. How do you defrag it?


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## Gunnyman (Jul 10, 2003)

umm who told you it was fragmented?
As a rule the filesystem Tivo uses doesn't fragment.
it's not an issue like it would be on a windows PC


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## ctznkne (Jan 7, 2006)

If that's true, he had no clue what he was talking about... What might cause the lag, then? It has only happened as the number of shows on the record list has grown ...


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## rhuntington3 (May 1, 2001)

If you have a lot of saved shows, that can cause some slowness. You might also try restarting your system via the menu.


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## ctznkne (Jan 7, 2006)

I have 25 shows recorded, with maybe 5 or 6 episodes on the LIST at any time


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## jaydro (Oct 19, 2003)

Yeah, I hear it doesn't fragment, too. But what is it that seems to degrade over time? I know previously people would point to the number of shows in the NPL you would accumulate etc., but when I went to 6.2 all my speed problems went away. Now after months of using it, while maintaining an NPL of about the same size and with about the same number of SPs, it's gotten bogged down again, though in different places than it did with 3.1. All that has changed is the shuffle of programs in and out of the NPL and the deletion and addition of SPs. It sounds like a fragmenting problem, doesn't it?

Edit: Oh, yeah, and rebooting doesn't really help.


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## ctznkne (Jan 7, 2006)

It IS a hard drive, after all. You're recording, deleting, modifying... I don't see how it could NOT get messy after a while...


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## JimSpence (Sep 19, 2001)

How many Season Passes and auto recording Wishlists do you have?
How many recordings are in the Now Playing List?

This is the order of things to try.
1) Restart/reboot
2) Reset Thumb Ratings $ Suggestions
3) Clear Program Data & To Do List
and as a last resort
4) Clear and Delete Everything

These options can be found under the Restart or Reset System Menu.

Read the warnings for #3 and #4.



ctznkne said:


> It IS a hard drive, after all. You're recording, deleting, modifying... I don't see how it could NOT get messy after a while...


It does get somewhat fragmented, but not nearly as much as Window's systems. Also, the linux OS, which is a basis of the TiVo, can do some cleanup on its own as required. Others can explain in more detail if needed.


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## doconeill (Dec 13, 2002)

Here is a previous post I made regarding fragmentation...


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## Charnlar (Nov 24, 2007)

my tivo unit has a a dvr player. When I placed a DVD into the unit, the tivo unit went into a continual reboot. When I called TIVO, I was told that the tivo unit loads a portion into a cache file, and if the disk is too fragmented, rather than being able to load it, it was kicking the machine into a reboot.

I was told that a badly fragmented disk would result in this behavior. I had to manually extract the dvd from the the reader before tivo unit would boot up


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## John T Smith (Jun 17, 2004)

Is that a DirecTV model with Tivo?

I have never heard of a DTivo with a DVD player, so I think you are not talking about the kind of Tivo for this forum... maybe the standalone Tivo forum?


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## woodway (Nov 5, 2006)

Actually, linux file systems can become fragmented, however due to the design of the filesystem, they tend to be more "fragmentation resistant" than Windows filesystems. Here is a simple explanation of the differences between Windows and Linux files systems:

http://geekblog.oneandoneis2.org/index.php/2006/08/17/why_doesn_t_linux_need_defragmenting

If your DirecTIVO is hacked, and you can open a command shell, it's easy to tell how fragmented your file system is - use the *e2fsck* command (found in the /sbin directory on my DirecTIVO, might be someplace else on yours). If you don't know the device names of the partitions on your disk, use the *df* command.

Here are the *e2fsck* results from the two partitions on my DirecTIVO:

/dev/hda7: 2489/32768 files (1.5% non-contiguous), 79893/131072 blocks
/dev/hda9: 4365/32768 files (12.2% non-contiguous), 41855/131072 blocks

As you can see, the first partition on my DirecTIVO ("/") is 1.5% fragmented, which is not worth worrying about. The second partition ("/var") is 12.2% fragmented, and if I was really worried about it, I could probably go track down and install one of the linux defrag tools to clean things up. But, my DirecTIVO runs fine, so I think I will leave it alone. 

If you do some google searching with the keywords "linux filesystem fragmentation", you'll get more information than you probably wanted...


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