"insufficient memory" error message while running disk defrag, any thoughts?

[Ghost]

A customer stopped in today and said when he runs disk defragmenter he gets an "insufficient memory" error message.

He has 128 megs of ram on a Win98 machine. That's all I know.

I've heard of that error message, but don't know what it means, and I'm curious.

Any thoughts?

Thanks

 

[DAM]

make sure he is not running any memory intense programs in the background, tell him to disable all programs except for systray and explorere through ctrl-alt-del, if he still gets this, then tell him to try another prog like norton or something, it might be that his win installation is a little [/b]fucked[/b] up with.



dam()

 

[Ulysses]

I think that sometimes the "insufficient memory" message appears when one really has "insufficient system resources." They are two different things. This is what DAM is referring to.

See http://www.zdnet.com/pcmag/stories/solutions/0,8224,2337348,00.html

 

[Durron]

It's probably because he has a hard drive that is over 8GB and it was formatted using a 3rd party program such as Western Digital's EZ Drive or the Maxtor variant or whatever. You have to do a real fdisk and format. (older versions of ghost had this problem too). What I usually do is dumb their data off to another hard drive, fdisk format their drive, then copy everything back using the "Copy Partition to Partition" type of option in EZ drive (since it only copies data and doesnt redo the partition/format).

Good luck,
-Durron

 

[anazoal]

Find the file "DEFRAG.INF" on your Win CD, right-click and install it.

Run the System Configuration Utility and, chose "Selective Startup" and uncheck ALL the boxes.

Reboot the system, it will defrag the HD BEFORE Win loads any drivers.

After the defrag, run the System Configuration Utility again and select Normal Startup (or revert back to the settings you had, if you'd played around with this before).

REboot once more.

 

[Donuts]

Try the simple stuff first. Shut down and reboot into safe mode. Run defrag from there. this shuts down any unnecessary programs and allows defrag to do it's job

 

[Wallysaurus]

If the drive was originally partitioned and formatted with EZ-Drive and it is larger than 8G, you will have to either use a program like Partition Magic to re-size your clusters or completely reformat your hard drive using fdisk and loose all your data. The problem is that as the drive gets larger, the cluster size needs to get larger so that these disk utilities can work. Here is a table:
.256-8.01G 4kb clusters
8.02-16.02G 8kb clusters
16.03-32.04G 16kb clusters
>32.04G 32kb clusters
Hope this helps.

 

[WUTANGYANG]

I have encountered similar situation couple times. I had two computers that had this problem, one had 128MB and one had 64MB of ram. Both of these machine will give me that message when I run something that doesn't require a lot of memory. Sometimes, it'll be AIM or ICQ, and as many of you know, these obviously didn't require a lot of memory. The first thing I thought was probably I need more memory, but w/ 128MB of ram I thought that was plenty. So, I did a bunch of things to try to figure out what it was, such as running tools to figure out what programs are taking how much memory. None seems to explain why. I came about to the reason when I accidentally put in a floppy that I have copied into my roommate's computer and a message popped up w/ a virus warning. A stealth_boot.c virus. For some reason, my virus scan didn't detect it. I guess it was out of date. I borrowed the newest copy of a virus scan, and lo and behold, the virus was found in my master boot record. I checked mcafee's website to find out what kind of damage this virus does. From what I remember, this virus doesn't do extensive damage. But it eats up memory in computers. That was the source of my problem. I have since gotten rid of it, and have not encountered this error message for some time now. It doesn't hurt to check if it's a virus. What you might want to make sure is that your emergency disks are read only when you check for it, because this virus corrupts any boot records as soon you read or write to it. Hope this helps.

 

[BT7990]

I agree with DAM. Programs running in the backround eat up memory. An easy way to control them is a cool little program called Start up Cop. Go to ZD Net downloads. Allows you to control which programs will run at start up. Otherwise go to msconfig through the run window/startup tab to do the same.