Defrag all nighter...still at 10 percent....why ?

[sailaway]

I've found my computer runs better if I run the disk defragmenter (under system tools) every couple of weeks. It used to take a few hours, then all night, and now even all night is not enough...still clickin away and at 10 percent* in the morning. Anybody know a solution or should I use this as an excuse to restart defrag and take a one week vacation ? :)

*another curiousity is that seems to be in love with that 10 percent number. In the past I've seen it take a few minutes to get to 10 percent, then sit on 10 percent for hours, but then go from 10 to 100 percent in a few minutes !

[Arthur]

How big is the drive and how much free space do you have? If there's not much free space defrag can have trouble moving and defragging big files.

[Justin]

The biggest issue with defragging is memory. If your system doesn't have enough memory, it will slow the process down quite a bit. Always make sure all programs are closed (virus scanners, even ICQ -- for such a tiny program, it is quite the resource hog). With Windows 9x/ME, reboot just before starting the defrag.

Also, if your drive is too full, it can take an unusually long time, as there isn't much space to work with for moving stuff around. If you're at more than 75% to 80% full, not only will defragging take a while, but it will have less effect anyway (there's not much room to leave padding, or "room for stuff to grow", and things will "refrag" quickly ;)[nbsp][nbsp])...

Finally, if your drive is running any type of low-level software (EZ-BIOS, MaxBlast, OnTrack, etc), many times this completely breaks Window's ability to do anything low-level, including scandisk and defrag (but typically, this being Windows and all, you won't receive an error about it)...

<edit>
I recall a discussion a couple of years ago regarding the Windows 98 &quot;Quick Launch&quot; toolbar causing problems with defrag. This is because Windows constantly rebuilds it's icon cache, and for some reason the Quick Launch bar likes to initiate this, sometimes from just hovering the mouse over it. Anyway, as I recall the solution was to get rid of the toolbar (right click --> Toolbars --> uncheck Quick Lauch) before running defrag.

I think this only happens in situations where there is an ungodly small amount of memory (like 32 megs) in the system -- I've never personally seen this issue on any of my systems.
</edit>

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Justin Nelson
SFE Software (http://www.sfesoftware.com)
[This message has been edited by Justin (edited 01-22-01@10:15 am)]

[sailaway]

I checked my hard drive space via system tools, drive space, properties and curiously I get a pie graph showing 100 percent free, but only 2GB total space. So I then checked under system information and get &quot;Windows managed swap file on Drive C. Available space 3243MB of 6137MB, Fat 32&quot;. This makes more sense since the drive is supposed to be 6.4GB.
Ram is 95MB (Dell CPU with Pentium 500mz).

What's with the pie graph....is my drive partitioned ?
[This message has been edited by sailaway (edited 01-22-01@11:06 am)]

[Matt]

Hi,
I think that Justin may have hinted to your problem. I have had similar problems in the past and it was because some background process was interrupting the defrag program, so that it had to start over. This may be a screen saver kicking in or task scheduler running something, or any number of background processes. In these cases, the defrag seems to hover around 10%. Maverick's post may explain the 10% figure.

Anyway, before you run the defrag program, make sure that all programs are closed, screen saver is disabled, and any unnecessary background task is killed. You should sit and watch the defrag program run... if it starts the scan, then restarts, something is interrupting it (i.e. accessing your hard drive). It might be easier to just run the defrag program as Windows starts, before it loads any other programs. If you want to do this, Winmag.com has a utility on their web site.

Hope this helps
-Matt

[Maverick]

One thing to try is to run a thorough error checker prior to defragging. Generally Windows does a quick check for file errors before defragging and reports back on lost fragments, bad sectors, etc before going ahead with the defrag. From what I've noticed, the disk checking is around 10% of the job and the actual defrag is the other 90%. If you keep hanging up on the 10% mark, it leads me to believe that some disk error is choking the defrag process and rather than reporting the error and prompting you for action about it, just stopping. Try running Scan Disk with the &quot;thorough&quot; option checked and the &quot;automatically fix errors&quot; option checked. Then try running defrag again.

[B24]

It used to take my computer forever to defrag too.[nbsp][nbsp]A lot of programs were running in the background causing it to restart the defragmenting process.[nbsp][nbsp]Now I just defragment my drives in safe mode.

Terry

[sailaway]

Aaaaaaaah....100 percent defrag at last. I started defrag immediately after rebooting this time and that apparently did the trick (either that or I overslept an hour which was just enough extra time !) Thanks all.