Cannot defrag a HDD

[soldano]

I have 2 equal SATA HDDs of 500 Gb each, and from a time to now, i cannot complete a defragging of disk No 2, using either O&O and Ultimate defrag.- Some time ago HD tune marked a couple of sectors damaged which I repaired with HDD regenerator and had no problems with further defragging.- I tested now the disk again with HD tune and no problems showed, also tried with HDD regenerator which didnt find problems.- Strangely I cannot complete a repairing scan using Checkdisk from the XP console.-
Should the cause be that the disk is damaged ?

 

[Blain]

What percentage of free space do you have on the drives?

 

[RebateMonger]

Personally, I wouldn't use a "repaired" hard drive. By the time they are showing bad sectors to the OS, they've already had a bunch of bad sectors locked out and have run out of the built-in "reserves". It's possible there's plating issues, head damage, or platter damage which will likely spread to other sectors.

 

[Nothinman]

Strangely I cannot complete a repairing scan using Checkdisk from the XP console.-
Should the cause be that the disk is damaged ?

If chkdsk won't finish, something is definitely wrong.

 

[soldano]

Originally posted by: Blain
What percentage of free space do you have on the drives?

Total capacity 500 Gb, free 11 Gb

 

[Blain]

Originally posted by: soldano

Originally posted by: Blain
What percentage of free space do you have on the drives?

Total capacity 500 Gb, free 11 Gb

So little % free space is a problem.

 

[RebateMonger]

Originally posted by: Blain
So little % free space is a problem.

Yeah, I know that Microsoft's defragger (the Vista one, I think) wouldn't run when I was below 10 GB with a 120 GB hard drive. If you are using an MS defragger, then double-check the free space restrictions.

Edit: In XP, it required 15% free space to run. According to Technet, Vista's defragmenter can be forced (-f switch) to run with less than 15%.

"So now that we've covered what disk fragmentation is and how to address it, there are some caveats. You must have at least 15 percent free space on the disk volume before Disk Defragmenter can completely defragment the volume. If you have less free space, then a partial defragmentation will occur (unless you force the defragmentation with the -f switch). Also, you cannot defragment a volume that has been marked by the OS as possibly containing errors. This is where you would need to use the CHKDSK.EXE utility to ensure that there are no underlying disk issues."

 

[rlim111]

To run defragmentation effectively, you must leave free disk space at least 15% of total capacity.
Altenatively, you can use defragger if you dont have 15% free space.