Disk write problem, can't defragment.

[elkinm]

I have a friend and his computer crawls to say the least. He probably never defragmanted his 4 GB hard drive. It is Windows 98 with about 1 GB free space. I tried both the scandisk and disk defragmanter and scandisk always restarted about half way and the defragmanter reached 1% about every 10 or more minutes and nothing else. I ran this with only explorer and systray running and I even tried it in safe mode and no luck. I used the dos scandisk to find that there were no errors but I still could not defragment. I instaled Norton SystemWorks 2001 got all the updates and I can scan for errors and can defragment but the defragmanter (Smart Disk) is also very slow. It takes about 2 minutes to scan and sort the hard drive but from there it only works for maybe 30 seconds or less defragmanting and then restarts again. It has been advancing like this for about 30 hours now. It started optimyzing at 17% and now it says 47% or so when it is working. I tryed runing it at startup before anything else loaded and it restarted the same way.

Is there anything I can do to get either windows or Norton Speeddisk to ignore the disk writes and actualy work or even better, to make sure no program can write to disk other then the defragmanter so it can actualy finish. I have seen many restarts on my and other systems but the absolute longest defrag time i know of was around 2 hours and that was on a much more full hard drive.

Thanks

 

[EagleKeeper]

Let the DOS version of scan disk and defrag run instead of the Windows version.

1GB of free space may be so swiss cheesed that it is difficult to defrag. The DOS version gives you a better visualization and also prevents any other items from interfering.

 

[chechi]

Run a complete scan disk first. That will help,I used to have this problem. Good Luck

 

[EagleKeeper]

Bad sectors may hang the Windows Scan Disk. If a bad sector is found on the drive, it can take up to 5-10 minutes for a repair/recovery to be done on that sector alone.