The Zen of OS Installation

Or lack thereof. It's kinda frustrating when you have a situation like I did this morning. I wanted to expand the Boot Camp partition on my laptop and reinstall Windows (migrating, in the course of this, from XP to Vista...yeah, don't ask), but it wouldn't let me allocate the partition the way I wanted.

HFS and HFS+, the journaled file systems on which OS X runs, are pretty decent at keeping individual files unfragmented (analysis shows that after over a year of decent usage file fragmentation was about 0.2%), it sucks at keeping free-space in one place (same analysis, 56% fragmented). That makes it pretty darn near impossible to mess around with partitions on older systems unless you're willing to pay for solution or backup your whole system and do a restore from the backup. Something just stinks about that situation.

Ah well, storms coming through town and all (Hello, Tornado Sirens!). Probably see some more chatter from me in the morning.

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Brevity of Speech

It's an admirable thing, generally. So I'll be it here: doing some OS reinstalls. Annoying that OSX, though it handles file fragmentation well, doesn't keep everything in one place, therefore Boot Camp can't make partitions on longer-existing, fuller hard drives.

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