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I decided to defragment one of the Windows boxes on my LAN, yesterday. Well, its has been 36+ hours and it is still clicking away.
The Unavailable Box:
Athlon 1.4ghz
512mb
120gb/100mbps Western Digital Drive (About 75-80% full. About 4 or 5 months since last defrag)
All programs & services shut down.
I'm beginning to think something is wrong. :mad:
Are modern drives to big to defrag? :rolleyes:
This is just my opinion but, im starting to think defragging a modern drive isnt needed at all... i mean its not bad but, it takes forever! and your HD is big why would you even need too? are you doing this in safe mode?
I didn't think of doing it in Safe Mode.
I wonder if it can be done in the "Recovery Console" mode? (I'm going to try that on one of the other PC's)
The analyzation map looked really scrappy.
Come to think of it, I've never seen a near full drive that had a clean map.
ya try it in safe mode or recovery console if thats possible? and ur analyzation map wont be clean so dont worry about that...
If you don't do it in safe mode it can keep restarting and would never finish.
I think there are disk utilities out there that can speed up defragemtation but I've never looked into it much. They are probably server tools. Worth a google.
Don't believe it..Quote:
im starting to think defragging a modern drive isnt needed at all.
OK true in win9x the FAT32 OS's yet to see it in XpeeQuote:
If you don't do it in safe mode it can keep restarting and would never finish.
What Operating system.. I would assume XP .. but it copuld be win 98 or Me for all I know,
HAve you run a check disk?
What file system is being used.. if FAT32.. start a defreag today job will be complete after Xmas
background software and malware.. you say no programs running.. how did you achieve this? have you also dealt with the running services?
What antivirus are you running on the box?
problems with very slow defrags can also come from very full drives..
a 120G drive at 80% used is about due for a clean, many large files ie 1Gb or more in size?.. if your running Win XP the default 12% reserved for System restore (hey have ya turned that off) and how big your swap file?
yep lots of possable causes..
I am still just scratching the surface
Hmmmm,
Given that hardware spec and the specific mention of "services", I would guess Win2000 or XP?
1. Defragment in safe mode is good advice, particularly if you have interactive anti-virus/malware programs running, as that allows the pattern files to be defragmented, so performance is improved.
2. I personally don't like to see a drive with less than 30% free space, performance drops off pretty quickly towards the end ;) [good point Undies~ ]
3. As far as I know the purpose of defragmentation is to improve system performance, and the size of the drive is irrelevant.
4. If the job is restarting you should get a warning message?
Undies~ makes a number of good points for you to consider ( I like the rather enigmatic "I am still just scratching the surface" :D )
With Win2000/XP and that hardware the job should not take more than 30 minutes in safe mode, based on my experiences.
So:
1. get rid of all obsolete files such as software demos, installation files, AV update files, temporary files etc.
2. Empty browser history and cache files
3. If you have restore points, get rid of those that are too old to be any good.
4. Scan for viruses/adware/spyware
5. Reboot into safe mode, and run the job again.
Good luck :D
And if you do have an old Windows OS and FAT32 get the free Diskeeper Lite defragmenter.
I stopped it.
Then I ran defrag(commandline) from a live CD(homemade Bart's PE). It finished in about 1.25 hours.
Still have no idea why it didn't work properly, to begin with.
I was afraid it was going to burn up the CPU if I let it continue.