I think my hd is dying...

[veggz]

..so I set a boot-time defrag for my 20g wd 7200rpm drive yesterday morning and it has been running until now and still isn't done. Is it normal to take this long? I know my 80g laptop takes about 2 min to do the same thing. Could it be because of the file system (my laptop is ntsf and my 20g is fat32)?

 

[kamaboko]

is this on a win98 machine?

 

[veggz]

No this is on an xp pro machine using the newest version of diskeeper.. I believe..

 

[yezhou]

Depends on what you got on that HD and how full it is. If its pretty full it'll take a while. If you got a lot of BIG files (ie. movies, etc.) it'll take a really long time. When was the last time you defragged? Also, clean out all your internet browsers' cache before defragging, this'll save time.

 

[SunSamurai]

1. You should have around at least %20 freespace on the drive.
2. If you are useing that drive, or windows, or anything else you may not even know of is accessing the drive in any way, it will take till the end of time to defrag.

 

[dunkster]

If you suspect HD problems, try the utility offered by the maker of your HD to test the integrity of the drive. These utilities will perform sequential read/writes over the entire HD (or partition), attempt to relocate data from any weak sectors to known-good sectors, and lock out the weak sectors from further use.

These utilites are free, effective and probably have better control of read-sensititivity than generic equivalent utitlities. In my experience, Western Digital's DLGDIAG has found weak sectors on my WD HD that CHKDSK did not.

Hope this helps!

 

[LTC8K6]

Yeah, it probably keeps restarting because some program is accessing the disk.

It could also be in PIO mode.

You can defrag in safe mode to make sure nothing is running or loaded.

 

[veggz]

Thanks guys. I really don't know what's going on.. every time I boot-time defrag the time it takes increases exponentially. I defrag from windows on a regular basis, and though that takes a few hours it is not nearly as long as this (coming up on 24 hrs). I have probably a little less than 20% free space, maybe around that. I think I'll try wd's hd utility (if this job finishes any time this month).. I suspece bad sectors may be the problem since at certain times during the defrag the disk gets really loud and at others it's almost silent, even though the hd light is continually on. And I don't think other programs are using the disk- since it is a boot-time defrag job, windows hasen't even started up yet.

 

[0roo0roo]

Originally posted by: dunkster
If you suspect HD problems, try the utility offered by the maker of your HD to test the integrity of the drive. These utilities will perform sequential read/writes over the entire HD (or partition), attempt to relocate data from any weak sectors to known-good sectors, and lock out the weak sectors from further use.

These utilites are free, effective and probably have better control of read-sensititivity than generic equivalent utitlities. In my experience, Western Digital's DLGDIAG has found weak sectors on my WD HD that CHKDSK did not.

Hope this helps!

 

[veggz]

Well I think I have officially set the record for longest single defrag ever.. 24 hours and still going strong.. my hd is going to melt