Hello, I have a brand new iBook (I just got it 3 days ago) and I just finished tranferring the gigbytes of data from my old computer onto it. Now this (the laptop) needs some serious defragging. I have Norton Utilities 7, but I don't have to boot CD (I lost it). So I need to burn my own bootable CD with Norton 7 on it. I tried copying the OS 9 Install CD that came with the iBook onto the computer (with the burner, a G4 tower if that matters), and removing everything on it except for the System Folder, and then placing the Norton Utilities 7.0 folder onto the CD. I then burned it with the built-in burning of OS X (I dragged the writable disk with the System folder and the Norton Util. folder) to the Trash, and it burned. When I popped the thing into my iBook, it came up alright. The contents were fine (the system and norton folders were in the root level of the CD like they were supposed to be). When I went to the Startup Disk control panel, the CD came up as being bootable with Mac OS 9.2.2. So I chose it as my startup disk and rebooted. Once rebooting started, the CD drive spun up and the screen flashed black for a minute, and then gray (like it was going to boot in OS 9). But then the system folder with a question mark came up, flashed once, and then my OS X took over the boot process. What happened?! Btw, the CD is burned in Mac OS Extended format like it is supposed to be. Any suggestions for me (other than re-purchasing Norton)? There don't seem to be many websites out there for this, and those that are out there are too old to be relavent to me.

A valid proof of purchase can usually get you replacement media for very little. However, if you've just re-copied all sorts of data onto a freshly formatted drive, the amount of fragmentation is minimal. Furthermore, defragging is a very very questionable procedure, more affected by the placebo effect than just about anything else you can do to a Mac, in my experience. It doesn't help speed in any measurable way that I've ever found, and because it was a waste of my time, I quit doing it about a year and a half ago with no ill effects since. p

Wow, I'm surprised. Whenever I used to do it on my iMac, I would notice significant speed enhancements and performance improvements. Also, if my drive isn't fragmented, then how do you explain the constant lagging in applications such as MS Word, iChat, and XWindows (aka XDarwin)? Before I loaded anything onto this laptop, all of the apps that came with it (such as iChat and AppleWorks) worked much faster than they did on the iMac... but now they don't seem to be. Also, documents in TextEdit and MS Word take a long time to save: a symptom of a fragmented drive. But anyway, does anyone know how to make a bootup disk as I described in my previous post? Thanks.