Defragging Troubles..

[Judgement]

When installing my most recent software purchase, I realized I haven't defragmented my hard drive for months!

Later in the day I started to defragment and noticed that it continually restarted staying the rives contents had changed". No big deal, I figure its my Virus scanner running or some other misc program. After making sure everything was closed down besides Explorer, I went on to try and defragmenting again..to no avail. Of course I don't like to be pesimistic, so I rebooted figuring that would solve the trick for sure.

I sure wish I was right.
I still, 2 hours later have no clue whatsoever as to whats causing the defrag to continually restart because of my C drive's contents changing.

Any ideas on whats going on and how I can fix it so I can defrag the friggin drive?

 

[solarbear]

I had a similar problem and it was bad memory in the computer. My computer was new so they swapped the memory for some better stuff.

Have you flashed your bios? Doing so may fix the problem, but maybe not though, having done so might cause the problem as well.

 

[Judgement]

I hope its not bad memory I just got my 133mhz 256mb CAS2 Crucial today in the mail and thats what its running on!

I still have my old 128mb of ram in there though..I guess I could try removing that and trying to defrag.

 

[paruhd0x]

Close eveything you don't need to run windows in the End Task window (CTRL ALT DEL).
Then try. (Don't use your computer while it is defragging) Oh and disable your screensaver.

It should work.

 

[ziplux]

Stupid question....how did you close your open programs? Use Ctrl-Alt-Del to ensure everything but Systray, explorer, and your defrag program are closed.

 

[Judgement]

Sorry guess I should have been more clear, thats exactly what I did before attempting to defrag. I used control+alt+delete to close everything besides explorer/sys.

 

[frustrated2]

I have never seen a computer defrag without stopping at some point and saying that the drive contents have changed. Does the computer still make progress?? and just stops and starts from the beginning quickly going over what it already has done till it gets to the fragged part of the drive??

Also if you haven't defragged your drives in months you might want to start it before you go to bed it will make it through after a while. Be patient that thing is probably really fragged up and when they are it takes forever to get them defragged no matter how fast your computer is

 

[Judgement]

I wish I could but at this rate I don't see how it could finish by the time I woke up...

It does go through what it has already done fast..but when it has to restart after working for about literally 5 seconds and scan the hard disk again...it is extremely slow.

I forget exactly the length of time, but the length of time it took to defrag just one full screen worth of data was horrendous. I've defragged TONS of times before and have never seen anything remotely close to how bad this is.

 

[Tominator]

Restart to Command Prompt. Scandisk....enter. I might add that in Windows 9X if you could set it to defrag before startup on EVERY reboot this alone would solve 80 to 90% of Windows problems....

 

[dcdomain]

Are you running your drives in DMA mode? this won't help with the pausing problem, but might speed things up faster. I ran scan disk on my drives w/o dma enabled, and it took a day and a half. Just had it sitting there...

 

[helloedchen]

easiest way to solve it, boot to dos prompt. Run scandisk like Tominator said

 

[Renob]

Use norton speed disk it always works... and be sure to shut down everything running in the back ground

 

[Judgement]

I ran scandisk from DOS, no errors were found....let it do a complete surface scan..nothing found wrong with my drive.

Come back into windows...close everything down...still continues to restart.

About DMA mode, to be honest I have no clue if my drives are in DMA mode, nor how to check if they are.

 

[bacillus]

simpliest method would be to defrag in safe mode!

 

[Shudder]

I had this happen once on my old PC. Yeah it took bloody FOREVER. It would redo all it did and then maybe get a screen or so, then restart.

Eventually it finished and it didn't happen again, but man did it suck at the time.

My advice is to just suck it up and let it do it one night/day and hopefully if it does finally finish it won't happen again.

Also, maybe disable virtual memory? I have no idea.

And if it comes down to it, diskeeper.com has a free version for 30 days, go for it.

 

[Jeff H]

Judgement, as you're reading, restarts w/ Defrag seem to be the norm. I'd about had it w/ Defrag when a friend recommended Power Defrag. Since downloading it I've used it a half dozen times and not a single restart. What Power Defrag does is restart your machine, w/o any of the offenders that cause the Defrag restarts, run Win9x Defrag, then restart your machine again when Defrag finishes. Finally you can run Defrag and not tear your hair out.