Re: Moving partition to an overlapping position

[Szakacsits Szabolcs]

On Wed, 20 Jul 2005, K.G. wrote:

> During the last year I've seen 2 Parti**** Mag** completly trashing NTFS 
> file systems on laptops,

PM is widely known to often damage things. Those are known software bugs.

> and I've had a power outage

I bet you weren't just resizing your workstation filesystem. Resize 
development work doesn't count ;-)

> In the first 2 cases, this was a crash

AFAIK PM uses DOS internally and it crashes. No surprise.

> and a battery problem,

Due to how the Windows NTFS driver and ntfsresize works, in general the 
resizing doesn't take longer than maximum 5 minutes. Laptops usually starts 
warning and keep doing so about low battery 15 minutes before they would 
drain (or OS just shutdowns cleanly). Probably PM doesn't have this feature 
either.

> (indeed the craziest idea I just had is to calculate the optimal sync 
> rate to minimize the probability of data loss given a set of parameters 
> modelising the software environement, but this is probably more a PHD 
> subject than something implementable during spare time :-)

It would be interesting to try out non-blocking fsync. But I'm afraid it 
wouldn't have the semantic I think it should have (ensuring ordering 
meanwhile returning immediately). This could be also implemented in user 
space but the kernel has everything for this, it just doesn't export the 
functionality, probably.

        Szaka