I’ve got 2 NTFS HD’s which I had with Window$ and now have Ubuntu and want to know if there is a defragger I can use to tidy them up as when they were used before Ubuntu, they were a mess.
Not that I’m aware of, although a branch of the ntfs-3g project are supposed to be working on something called ultradefrag (including a Linux port for defragging NTFS partitions):
http://b.andre.pagesperso-orange.fr/advanced-ntfs-3g.html
There’s probably a good reason these tools don’t exist … Windows doesn’t like having system files moved around on the drive, but these are locked during a defrag from Windows so can’t be moved … whilst defragging from another OS (or even another Windows PC), these system files wouldn’t be locked, so you may mess up Windows … it would be safe on an NTFS drive that is just a storage drive, but then their is little incentive for someone to write such a tool for Linux, they would say “switch to a Linux file system”
I’d hook them up to a Windows machine, and defrag them there … or even better, copy everything off, format them as EXT4, and copy everything back.
That’s what I plan on doing in the long run, also to get a NAS drive and format that to one that Linux can read and move stuff off my NTFS drives and reformat them.