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tomdavidson69 · Nov 16, 2003, 08:14 PM

This may be such an obvious question, so please excuse my ignorance!

If I click 'enable journaling' in disk utility for my FW drive, will it wipe it, and create a new partition with journaling on? Or will it just add it in without losing any data?

I'm running Panther 10.3.1...

Thanks in advance!

chris v · Nov 16, 2003, 08:18 PM

Mine seems to have survived. The consensus at this point, however is to unmount and shut down any firewire drives before shutting down/restarting. There's been a rash of Firewire drive corruptions happening while booting with the drive on and connected.

CV

tomdavidson69 · Nov 16, 2003, 08:31 PM

Yeah, I'm being pretty panicky about that FW issue, but I've updated all the firmware (FW400) and it seems to be fine.

I was looking for any data loss specific to enabling journaling as I don't want to have to have gone to all this bother to save my data only to have it wiped when I decide to enable journaling!!!

Cheers!

Developer · Nov 16, 2003, 08:33 PM

You can just turn on/off journaling. It doesn't wipe your drive.

The Firewire drive issue is unrelated.

tomdavidson69 · Nov 16, 2003, 08:39 PM

Originally posted by Developer:
You can just turn on/off journaling. It doesn't wipe your drive.

The Firewire drive issue is unrelated.

cool, if it's that easy I might alternate journaling on/off every other day! What a roller-coaster of fun my life is!!

Thanks for the help

Arkham_c · Nov 17, 2003, 08:36 AM

It's worth noting that you should run disk first aid before you turn on journaling.

Krusty · Nov 17, 2003, 11:01 AM

Originally posted by tomdavidson69:
cool, if it's that easy I might alternate journaling on/off every other day! What a roller-coaster of fun my life is!!

WHOA !! .... easy there crazy-man. Next you'll be having your desktop pic change every five minutes. Tone it down over there

davidb224 · Nov 17, 2003, 01:27 PM

Originally posted by tomdavidson69:
This may be such an obvious question, so please excuse my ignorance!

If I click 'enable journaling' in disk utility for my FW drive, will it wipe it, and create a new partition with journaling on? Or will it just add it in without losing any data?

I'm running Panther 10.3.1...

Journaling is enabled by default in Panther. I assume that Journaling is enabled to act a safety net for any power failures that might occur while automatic defragging and hot-file clustering are going on in Panther.

To clarify, there are two separate automatic file optimizations going on in Panther.

The first is Automatic File Defragmentation.

When a file is opened, if it is highly fragmented (8+ fragments) and under 20MB in size, it is defragmented. This works by just moving the file to a new, arbitrary, location.

This only happens on Journaled HFS+ volumes.

Basically, when a file is accessed, a check is made to see if it is fragmented (split into several different sectors on the Hard Drive), If so, and if the file is less than 20 MB in size, the filesystem will copy the file over to a contiguous area on the HD that will hold the file in it's entirety in concurrent sectors, and then free up the HD space the fragmented version used to occupy.

The second is the Adaptive Hot File Clustering.

Over a period of days, the OS keeps track of files that are read frequently - these are files under 10MB, and which are never written to. At the end of each tracking cycle (which is 60 hours, I think), the "hot" files (the files that have been read 16 or more times) are moved to the "hot-band" of the disk - this is the fastest part of the disk given the physical disk characteristics (the hot-band is currently sized at 5MB per GB).

"Cold" files are evicted to make room. As a side effect of being moved into the hotband, the "hot" files are defragmented. Currently, Adaptive Hot File Clustering only works on the boot volume, and only for Journaled HFS+ volumes over 10GB.

These are two good reasons to leave Journaling enabled in Panther.

SSharon · Nov 17, 2003, 03:33 PM

davidb, thanks for a great explanation of panther. maybe someone here can give me some advice.

so I installed panther on my second hard drive and everything there is fine, BUT now my original 80gb drive gets errors in drive 10 and disk utility saying something about invalid file count. It was unable to repair this (but I did repair permissions). So, should I enable journaling on that drive (which still has 10.2.4 on it and not panther) and try repairing again or just leave it alone? Thanks

davidb224 · Nov 17, 2003, 06:54 PM

Originally posted by SSharon:
davidb, thanks for a great explanation of panther. maybe someone here can give me some advice.

so I installed panther on my second hard drive and everything there is fine, BUT now my original 80gb drive gets errors in drive 10 and disk utility saying something about invalid file count. It was unable to repair this (but I did repair permissions). So, should I enable journaling on that drive (which still has 10.2.4 on it and not panther) and try repairing again or just leave it alone? Thanks

I'd leave it alone. I'd also suggest you get to where you are using Panther as your main system ASAP.

SSharon · Nov 17, 2003, 07:01 PM

thanks for the reply. I backup all my school work and haven't started up in 10.2.4 since I installed panther and don't know why I would. I am hoping the drive cooperates long enough for me to buy a new 160gb drive (can I stick that on the second slower ide controller in a MDD or do I need to do some shuffling?) that I can copy all my files to and then I will wipe it clean and put panther on it.