can't Defragment C drive

E

entizari

Hi,
hope someone can help. recently, when noticing the C drive was fairly full,
I decided among other things, to defrag the drive, but I couldn't. after
attempting to analyze the drive, I get a stop(?) message, as follows:
"Disc Defragmenter cannot continue prescan because there is corruption in
file C:\I386\ASMS\5100\MSFT\WINDOWS" (sometimes the corruption is listed in
file C:\I386\ASMS\10100\POLICY\MSFT).

any suggestions on how to fix this, so defragging can procede would be
appreciated. I'm hoping reformatting the hard drive won't be necessary?
cheers

oh, PS the computer's running Windows XP sp3
 
P

philo

entizari said:
Hi,
hope someone can help. recently, when noticing the C drive was fairly
full,
I decided among other things, to defrag the drive, but I couldn't. after
attempting to analyze the drive, I get a stop(?) message, as follows:
"Disc Defragmenter cannot continue prescan because there is corruption in
file C:\I386\ASMS\5100\MSFT\WINDOWS" (sometimes the corruption is listed
in
file C:\I386\ASMS\10100\POLICY\MSFT).

any suggestions on how to fix this, so defragging can procede would be
appreciated. I'm hoping reformatting the hard drive won't be necessary?
cheers

oh, PS the computer's running Windows XP sp3



from the command prompt run chkdsk /f

(say yes, then reboot)

Hopefully that will correct the problem.

BTW: you should probably perform a disk cleanup as you will not be able to
properly defragment your drive if it's too full
 
S

SC Tom

entizari said:
Hi,
hope someone can help. recently, when noticing the C drive was fairly
full,
I decided among other things, to defrag the drive, but I couldn't. after
attempting to analyze the drive, I get a stop(?) message, as follows:
"Disc Defragmenter cannot continue prescan because there is corruption in
file C:\I386\ASMS\5100\MSFT\WINDOWS" (sometimes the corruption is listed
in
file C:\I386\ASMS\10100\POLICY\MSFT).

any suggestions on how to fix this, so defragging can procede would be
appreciated. I'm hoping reformatting the hard drive won't be necessary?
cheers

oh, PS the computer's running Windows XP sp3

Are you running Windows defrag, or a 3rd party one?
At a command prompt type

chkdsk C: /F /R

When it asks you if you want to run check disk on the next start up, hit Y.
Reboot, and pay close attention to any errors that may show. After you're
fully booted up, try defrag again.

SC Tom
 
E

entizari

I'm running Windows defrag.
I've tried checkdisc without any success, though I may try again, and look
to see if any errors are listed like you sugggest.
I also ran scannow sfc without any luck either.

should chkdsk fix errors by itself or does it need to be done manually?
if the former, then it's not doing anything to change the situation

and I've also done a disc cleanup, there's a few gig free so I figure this
should be enough to defrag?
 
E

entizari

"a few gig" doesn't seem to be quite that, but for C drive there's 2.32 GB of
16.6 GB free (which is just over 16% - tight I know). total HDD is about 35
GB.

don't suppose the 16% free would be causing the file corruption issue, or is
this a completely seperate thing?
thanks for the advice
 
E

entizari

well, I ran checkdisc again, and it didn't find any issues at all.
does anyone have any other suggestions? would be hugely appreciated.
it's my parents computer and they don't want to listen to the idea of
reformatting the whole thing
cheers
 
J

JimW

I had a problem Defragging my computer. I thank three files of 1.9 GB would
not defrag. This may be your problem. These files were in Outlook Express.
To recover this space I had to go into Outlook Express under File and
compact each folder. i.e. In, Out, and Delete folder. I also use
Newsgroups. I Compact each of the folders. I recovered a lot of hard drive
space. I hope this helps.
Jim
 

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