I'm catching up today on those tasks we mean to do but never get round to.
I haven't defragged my admin pc for a couple of years or more (yes I know I'm naughty and should do it more often).
It has been running about 5 hours now and is still showing 0%.
I suspect it first looks for bad clusters before it reshuffles the data, so maybe the % doesn't change during this startup task.
There is about 22 gig of files on this 24 gig pc.
I can here it chugging away, so I don't think it's 'hanged'.
My 'admin' pc is win98 (not se) and I do most of my surfing on it.
So lots of small files created and deleted, which will make it work harder.
Am I being impatient or does it sound like a glitch?
Dave.
P.S. I have Norton antivirus turned on.
I tend to switch off anti virus software while defragging as AV and defrag software tend to go together like chalk and cheese.
Hi Shaun,
In light of what you say I have removed adsl cable and disabled virus checker.
Thought I'd try scanDisk before I defrag, but keep getting message:
'Scandisk has restarted 10 times, because windows or another program is wrining to this drive
Quitting some programs may enable scandisk to finish sooner'
I have no programs running apart from the background stuff like the printer, sound card etc.
I did it straight from a reboot.
Any suggestions on how to proceed?
Dave.
Reboot in safe mode.
End any non-essential tasks.
Defragging a drive with only 4% of free space is not going to work very well - if at all. Delete all temp files and anything else not required that are on the drive in question.
See if you can move some files to another drive while you defrag this one.
Run the dafrag overnight.
To make sure that nothing 's running in the background, I suggest you get hold of EndItAll (free, can't remember where to get it from but Google'll fix that). It gives you a list of everything that's running, together with avice on whether it's safe to kill stuff or not.
Thanks Gavin,
Good point about housekeeping - but I haved deleted unwanted files already.
Not currently practical to 'offload' to networked pc.
Eventually got into safe mode
'help' says hold ctl key down until menu appears - but I just receive a message saying a key is stuck.
Eventually got there by pressing F8 intermittently.
For future reference when should I press ctrl or F8 to bring up safe mode screen?
Thought I'd run scandisk before defrag.
The only background program is 'explorer'.
After about 30 mins I get:
'Scandisk has restarted 10 times, because windows or another program is writing to this drive
Quitting some programs may enable scandisk to finish sooner'
...again.
If I try to end the background 'explorer' task, it invites me to restart the pc.
Any suggestions gratefully received.
Dave.
You can't stop Explorer, it's a fundamental part of Windows. Unfortunately.
Thanks Gavin and Alan,
After sticking on scandisk I aborted and defragged.
No reason why it should work now... but - seems to be up to 13% in about 20 mins.
Went through google before I tried safe mode and did try and kill programs un-necessary - but they all seemed 'genuine' and needed.
Having wireless keyboard mouse etc doesn't help as killing them might leave myself unable to navigate.
I'm off to watch the end of the Beiderbecke tapes now while it hope fully creeps past 13%.
Dave.
With Windows 98, disconnect from the internet (as your AV will be shut down), then go ctrl-alt-del to bring up the running processes. Close all processes except Systray and Explorer, that will leave you with just bare Windows running
Up to 63% defragged now.
I reckon it will be another 12 hours to finish.
I am going away in the next few hours for the weekend.
Any known 'bad things' that may happen if I leave it in standby/idle mode (assuming it finishes) till I get back - or is it safer to stop and restart at a later date?
Dave.
I think dilbert has the answer :
Thanks Gary,
I used to work in an IT department where DILBERT/DOGBERT was there point of reference too.
Eventually finished at 14.30, so about 15 hours.
It kindly did a grand finale - 'blue screen of death'/fatal exception on reaching 100%.
Fortunatley, its post death existence has no side-effects to-date and not obviously quicker - but its functioning with no viruses / spies, so I'm happy.
Dave.