Easy2Boot's UEFI menu returned straight to the menu for the new kiosk ISO
(a 3.5 GB copy on a well-used drive). Some multiboot modes need the ISO in
one unbroken piece, and Linux has no defragmenter for NTFS/FAT32/exFAT -
Easy2Boot's own Linux helpers are a 32-bit udefrag needing i386 libraries
and a FAT32-only perl script.
e2b-contig.sh rewrites just the one file, using only ordinary file
operations - never filesystem structures - so the worst case is "still
not contiguous", never a damaged drive:
1. fill the drive's free space with 4 MB filler files (plugs every gap;
a plain copy, or fallocate where it exists at all, just fills the
gaps again - measured on ntfs-3g: 7-8 pieces either way);
2. map the fillers (filefrag -e, which also works on ntfs-3g via FIBMAP)
and find the longest physically unbroken run of single-piece ones;
3. free just enough of that run and write the copy - the only free space
left - then delete the fillers;
4. verify the copy's SHA-256 against the original and rename it into
place (same directory, so the data doesn't move).
If there's no run big enough while the original is on the drive,
--move-out parks it on this computer (checksummed), retries, and puts it
back verified if that still fails. --check only reports. Interrupts and
failures remove fillers and temp copies.
Tested on NTFS images through ntfs-3g: a 60 MB file in 7 pieces became 1
piece with identical content, no leftovers, free space unchanged (27 s for
~900 MB free); drives with no big enough free run (with and without
--move-out) report so and leave the original byte-identical, parked copy
cleaned up. FAT32/exFAT through their FUSE drivers can't report layout,
which the tool detects and stops on, naming the kernel driver to remount
with (vfat/exfat/ntfs3); the kernel drivers aren't available in the test
environment, so those paths are untested.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Cjz8a58eB5P9sUweqd3NHm
Claude
d4f9233655