can't defragment certain files

[Guest]

when i run windows defragmenter, it won't defrag certain files. these are
large, all above 600 mb, the most at 1 gb. this is annoying because once it
hits thease, it stops and the rest of my drive is in shambles. thanks

 

[Newbie Coder]

ihammerhands2000,

What are the files & what application are they in use by when you try to
defrag?

What processes are running at the time

What are the location of these fragmented files if known?

 

[dobey]

when i run windows defragmenter, it won't defrag certain files. these are
large, all above 600 mb, the most at 1 gb. this is annoying because once
it
hits thease, it stops and the rest of my drive is in shambles. thanks

You might try moving these files off the HDD, defrag, then returning them. I
think when your disk space gets low, larger files aren't defragmented fully.

When you say the rest of the drive is in a "shambles", what do you mean? Are
these separate files that can't be defragmented, or just one single file
broken into a number of pieces?

Are you going on the visual image or the log. Look at the log and see
exactly how many files are fragmented.

I am willing to bet there are two or three large files fragmented in two or
three pieces, but because they show up as red on defragmenter it looks like
there is lots of defragmented data, that will severely affect your
performance. A large file in several pieces won't hurt performance.

AFAIK, the only file that Windows defragmenter won't touch is the page file,
IIRC in yellow, and there is a tool for that -
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/FileAndDisk/PageDefrag.mspx

 

[Malvern]

Did you try Disk Cleanup yet ? May get things in line.

Malv

 

[Guest]

ok, when i say "in shambles", i mean like half the bar that shows fragmented
files is red. my computer is suffering. there are 9 files ranging from 687 mb
to 1 gb totaling at 6.64 gb. yes, i know thats big. here's the message a get:

Fragments File Size Files that cannot be defragmented
6 220 MB \Documents and Settings\All
Users\Application Data\AOL\C_America Online 9.0\organize\smdeanoluv
42 687 MB
\RECYCLER\S-1-5-21-3251417054-3162088648-3116330118-1006\Dc2.avi
95 696 MB
\RECYCLER\S-1-5-21-3251417054-3162088648-3116330118-1006\Dc1.avi
37 698 MB \move\b4.avi
66 699 MB
\RECYCLER\S-1-5-21-3251417054-3162088648-3116330118-1006\Dc3.avi
44 701 MB \move\b1.avi
209 701 MB \move\b2.avi
119 900 MB \move\b3.avi
262 1.00 GB \move\b5.divx

and with that copy idea, it takes forever. even with command prompt set at
realtime, it still takes forever and my computer freezes sometimes. does
anybody know a way around it?

 

[Wesley Vogel]

Empty your Recycle Bin.

Make sure that AOL is not running when you run defrag, so that AOL is not
using whatever file.

RECYCLER\S-1-5-21-3251417054-3162088648-3116330118-1006 is your Recycle Bin.

S-1-5-21-3251417054-3162088648-3116330118-1006 is you SID.

SID is a user's security ID.

--
Hope this helps. Let us know.

Wes
MS-MVP Windows Shell/User

In

 

[dobey]

ok, when i say "in shambles", i mean like half the bar that shows
fragmented
files is red. my computer is suffering. there are 9 files ranging from 687
mb
to 1 gb totaling at 6.64 gb. yes, i know thats big. here's the message a
get:

Fragments File Size Files that cannot be defragmented
6 220 MB \Documents and Settings\All
Users\Application Data\AOL\C_America Online 9.0\organize\smdeanoluv
42 687 MB
\RECYCLER\S-1-5-21-3251417054-3162088648-3116330118-1006\Dc2.avi
95 696 MB
\RECYCLER\S-1-5-21-3251417054-3162088648-3116330118-1006\Dc1.avi
37 698 MB \move\b4.avi
66 699 MB
\RECYCLER\S-1-5-21-3251417054-3162088648-3116330118-1006\Dc3.avi
44 701 MB \move\b1.avi
209 701 MB \move\b2.avi
119 900 MB \move\b3.avi
262 1.00 GB \move\b5.divx

and with that copy idea, it takes forever. even with command prompt set at
realtime, it still takes forever and my computer freezes sometimes. does
anybody know a way around it?

<snip>

Maybe there is some other problem which is causing Defragmenter to stop.
From your description it may be hanging on moving large files, so stops. You
don't say how much free space is available.

I don't know what the command prompt, or "realtime" has to do with anything.
Have you "tweaked" your system somehow that is affecting performance?

The idea is to move a few files off the HDD, empty the recycle bin defrag,
then see if anything is left fragmented, move other files back onto drive.
If you don't delete file in the recycle bin Windows treats them like any
other file.

I regularly move gigabyte files around and over a network, so to me 6.6 GB
is nothing. Maybe if you work on fixing the freezing issue, your defrag
problem will be solved.

The problem with the graphical indicators in these programs is that if I
have three, 4GB files and 20 GB of other data an a HDD (32 GB total), and
the 4 GB files are split in two pieces, the "red" parts will look like a
huge problem to the novice - they are not, this situation is nothing to
worry about and I doubt there would be any measureable perfromance loss. I
think this is your situation.

 

[Guest]

ok, here is what i see when i defrag my computer:

http://img511.imageshack.us/img511/8950/defragao9.png

i have no idea what is happening. i don't want to move them because that
takes too long. it took 2 hrs to copy 4 files. i used command prompt to copy
those files because the explorer one always freezes my computer. even when i
put it on realtime, that little thing in the task manager where you set the
priority of programs. and the two other drives you see are actually 1 hard
drive. it was the one off of my ME computer. yes, those files are on that
hard drive also but it always crashes my comp when i run them. i just want to
fix this problem with the defrag. any suggestions?

 

[PD43]

i have no idea what is happening. i don't want to move them because that
takes too long. it took 2 hrs to copy 4 files. i used command prompt to copy
those files because the explorer one always freezes my computer

You have bigger problems than just defrag.

You'd better backup your data before a disaster hits you.

 

[Guest]

i have backed up my files. there on that f:\ drive. the only problem is
though is that i can't run programs off that drive because my comp crashes.

 

[dobey]

Something about moving deckchairs springs to mind...

Unless your PC is very old it shouldn't take hours to copy a few gigabytes
of data, in which case I doubt it would run XP.

It looks like you need to update your chipset drivers or something, because
your PC just isn't running properly. From the sound of it, any program that
tries to defragment will fail because the system will hang at some stage.

Have you run chkdsk at any stage? The second HDD would be 20 GB or so? It
could be running in PIO mode or something, I imagine it's a few years old
now, and by juggling the priority of one program over another you are making
problems for yourself, unless you really know what you are doing.

Have you disabled any services - something which maybe you don't know what
it does, but are sure you don't need?

If I were you I would be inclined to start from scratch, re-install XP, get
the latest drivers, get rid of the old HDD and move to something that
supports UDMA 66 at least.

I know it's not what you asked, but I think you defrag problems are just the
sign of a shot system.

 

[Guest]

are you saying it's impossible with the windows defragmenter? and with speed,
its a fairly new computer. xp home, v.2002 service pack 2, pentium 4
processor, 256 mb of ram, sounds good. is there a way to tell defrag not to
do it on thease files? i just want to get this over with. oh yea, and i
havn't tampered with any of the settings, and i just used the priority
setting once, and that was with the copy thingy. both of my drives are on the
same ribbon cable, would it make a faster copy if i seperated them?

 

[Carl Kaufmann]

You should almost never set _anything_ to Realtime priority. That
basically says to Windows "No matter what, do not do anything else."
It's no wonder you can't get your machine to respond. In any case
it won't make a file copy any faster - that depends on the speed of
your drives, not on CPU.

Make sure that you have up to date chipset drivers in order to get
the most speed from your drive controller.

 

[Guest]

I'm having a similar problem with defrag - I do a defrag, analyse again and
it says that I still need to do a defrag.
The free space is very fragmented so I suspect defrag is struggling to
rearrange the remaining 27 files into contiguous blocks. These files range
from 8MB - 91MB and include Google Earth's cache(91MB) and 8 restore
points(19MB each).
I've done a disk cleanup and chkdisk, deleted a lot of unnecessary files,
moved some programs to a different drive and also closed down a lot of
non-essential processes and it still won't defrag any further.
My machine isn't running slowly.

 

[Pegasus \(MVP\)]

I'm having a similar problem with defrag - I do a defrag, analyse again
and
it says that I still need to do a defrag.
The free space is very fragmented so I suspect defrag is struggling to
rearrange the remaining 27 files into contiguous blocks. These files range
from 8MB - 91MB and include Google Earth's cache(91MB) and 8 restore
points(19MB each).
I've done a disk cleanup and chkdisk, deleted a lot of unnecessary files,
moved some programs to a different drive and also closed down a lot of
non-essential processes and it still won't defrag any further.
My machine isn't running slowly.

You write "I'm having a similar problem with defrag" and "My machine
isn't running slowly". Since you're machine is not running slowly, you
don't really have a problem even though the degree of fragmentation
may run contrary to your desire to keep your machine in perfect nick.

If you insist then you may be able to defrag your files further by making
sure that you have not less than 20% of free disk space.

 

[Mike Lowery]

I'm having a similar problem with defrag - I do a defrag, analyse again and
it says that I still need to do a defrag.
The free space is very fragmented so I suspect defrag is struggling to
rearrange the remaining 27 files into contiguous blocks. These files range
from 8MB - 91MB and include Google Earth's cache(91MB) and 8 restore
points(19MB each).
I've done a disk cleanup and chkdisk, deleted a lot of unnecessary files,
moved some programs to a different drive and also closed down a lot of
non-essential processes and it still won't defrag any further.
My machine isn't running slowly.

Try this utility:
http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/Hard-Disk-Utils/Power-Defragmenter.shtml