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Wanted: A faster Deltree

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Glenn Garrett

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Apr 29, 2002, 3:00:35 AM4/29/02
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When reinstalling windows I use deltree to delete the entire windows
directory. This can take up to an hour. Is there an alternative utility?
Don't tell me to reformat my drive!
Glenn


Matthew Kruk

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Apr 29, 2002, 3:22:19 AM4/29/02
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You must have a slow machine or some background task happening (antivirus
software running perhaps?). On my 233MX, deltree of a 2G (20,000 file - approx)
directory takes less than 15 minutes (and I've got Norton Protection on).

E.P. van Westendorp

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Apr 29, 2002, 3:56:44 AM4/29/02
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Maybe it helps when SMARTDRV has been loaded.

--

Eric P. van Westendorp Tel: +31(0252)210579
Reigerslaan 22 2215NN Voorhout Netherlands

Martin Stromberg

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Apr 29, 2002, 3:49:48 AM4/29/02
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Glenn Garrett (ind...@lin.cbl.com.au) wrote:
: When reinstalling windows I use deltree to delete the entire windows

: directory. This can take up to an hour. Is there an alternative utility?
: Don't tell me to reformat my drive!

You do this in plain DOZE, don't you? If so SMARTDRV.EXE should speed
it up.


Right,

MartinS

William Allen

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Apr 29, 2002, 7:54:14 AM4/29/02
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"Glenn Garrett" wrote in message

> When reinstalling windows I use deltree to delete the entire windows
> directory. This can take up to an hour. Is there an alternative utility?
> Don't tell me to reformat my drive!

(1) Use a SmartDrv cache to speed up DELTREE

OR (assuming you have the spare disk space) simply:

(2) Use: REN C:\WINDOWS WINDOWS.OLD
(note that REN in Win95 and higher will rename folders,
but don't specify drive in the new folder name)
Then when you've rebinstalled Windows, simply delete the
WINDOWS.OLD folder in Windows Explorer in the GUI,
where the 32-bit cacheing will mean it's erased quickly
(and the deletion runs in the background anyway, so
it hardly matters how long it takes).

--
(pp) William Allen


Marco van de Voort

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Apr 29, 2002, 8:01:29 AM4/29/02
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1. Load smartdrive before you delete.
2. (even faster) Boot from linux install discs, mount dos partition, and kill
the dirs you need.


Marco van de Voort

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Apr 29, 2002, 8:02:10 AM4/29/02
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He does that from dos mode probably, not from within windows.

Batchman

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Apr 29, 2002, 10:06:16 AM4/29/02
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Here's what worked for me (and for others). When I had a directory that
couldn't be deleted under DOS. Using Norton DiskEdit, edit the parent
directory and overlay the first character of the problem directory name
with alt-229. (That's hex E5, the character used by DOS to indicate
that a file has been deleted. It's a small sigma in the DOS character
set.) The problem directory will no longer appear in a directory
display, but it's not entirely gone yet. CHKDSK will report lost
allocation units, but CHKDSK /F will recover thoem and complete the
repair.

Should be a quicker way to remove any large directory.

--
Batchman

Bill in Colorado

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Apr 29, 2002, 12:21:46 PM4/29/02
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There is no maybe about it! You've *got* to use smartdrv to solve this
problem!

E.P. van Westendorp

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Apr 29, 2002, 1:52:15 PM4/29/02
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Yes I knew that!

--

Eric P. van Westendorp Tel: +31(0252)210579
Reigerslaan 22 2215NN Voorhout Netherlands

Glenn Garrett

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Apr 29, 2002, 6:50:05 PM4/29/02
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Thanks for everyone's help. I didn't think of using smartdrive.
The suggestion of renaming windows from dos and then deleting the renamed
dir from the new windows installation is what I have done when I've had
lots of spare disk space.
Its funny I would have thought that with a cpu > 800MHz and 256MB ram and
just running dos that a simple file delete (even though there is 40,000 odd
files) would be much faster.
Glenn


Batchman

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Apr 30, 2002, 1:07:32 AM4/30/02
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DOS 7.x - takes some protected mode memory
(for Registry/configuration/others) and is much less optimized
for performance than previous MS-DOS' as it is used by Win 4.x as a
bootstrap loader only. In particular it runs up to 2x slower over
networks or without a disk cache.

--
Batchman

Robert B. Clark

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Apr 30, 2002, 12:29:07 PM4/30/02
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On Tue, 30 Apr 2002 08:50:05 +1000, "Glenn Garrett" <ind...@lin.cbl.com.au>
wrote:

>Its funny I would have thought that with a cpu > 800MHz and 256MB ram and
>just running dos that a simple file delete (even though there is 40,000 odd
>files) would be much faster.

The bottleneck here is not the processor speed or amount of RAM, but the
HDD itself. That's why using SmartDrive is recommended.

--
Robert B. Clark
Visit ClarkWehyr Enterprises On-Line at http://www.3clarks.com/ClarkWehyr/

Richard Collins

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Apr 30, 2002, 6:56:27 AM4/30/02
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"Glenn Garrett" <ind...@lin.cbl.com.au> wrote in message
news:P6kz8.9$XC2....@nsw.nnrp.telstra.net...

What does that "simple file delete" have to do?

_That's_ simple - it has to mark the directory entry as "available", and
then it has to mark _every cluster_ as "available", too.

That's one hell of a lot of disk-writing - and that's why it takes a while.

Charles Angelich

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May 1, 2002, 3:06:16 AM5/1/02
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In article <P6kz8.9$XC2....@nsw.nnrp.telstra.net>, ind...@lin.cbl.com.au
says...

The File Allocation Table (FAT) has to be rewritten after each file is removed
- a large drive has a larger FAT table to rewrite each time.

--
Take Care -
>
> __
> | / \ \ USA, MI // \\
> \_\\ //_/ Crawling on The Web _\\()//_
> .'/()\'. Charles Angelich / // \\ \
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