If you defrag a hard drive with "almost no free space left" it won't have a
lot of free space after defrag and the defrag may fail anyhow.
Use disk cleanup and remove all "garbage" from the drive first. Check the
temporary folders and remove as much as you can. Clean your temporary
internet files folder using IE. Once you free up the hard drive space then
defrag the drive using the Windows XP defragment utility.
In Windows Explorer (or opened My Computer) right click on the drive letter.
Click Disk Cleanup. Clear as much as you can there. Then once that is done
click Tools then under Defragmentation, click Defragment now. Follow the
instructions to defragment. If it fails, you may want to run the
Error-checking option just above Defragmentation first.
If you're running out of disk space you could uninstall software. Go to
<Start><Control Panel><Add or Remove Programs> and also the <Add / Remove
Windows Components>. Remove ONLY the software that you positively know you
don't want and don't be tempted to remove anything you don't know about. It
may just be important.
Disk Cleanup and Defragging (already covered by others) will then complete
the job.
Disk Cleanup will only run if you have 15% free space
If you have that little free space, either your sys is full of junk or you
need to get a larger HD or install a slave HD and move stuff to that
Disk cleanup will run regardless. I have a hard drive with *very*
little free space Disk Cleanup still analyses. I'm poking around to
find out how to turn *off* that warning. I know the drive is full.
It's a storage drive for media files. It's *supposed* to be full.
Defrag will tell you you need 15% free space, but will run anyway if you
tell it to. It just won't do as effective a job.
______
Dennis
Didn't work. I did all of these things. It's a 40G drive in two
partitions. The C drive is the problem. If I get a backup drive, copy
everything over, then reformat, will that work? How will I boot from the
back up? Thanks.
Your assumption that you will have a tremendous amount of freespace is
incorrect when done with defragmentation.
The solution is buying and installing an appropriate larger capacity 2.5"
hard drive for your laptop. How to get the current data there from the
other hard drive depends on your system.
If you have 1Gig of RAM or more, disable the swapfile. Open msconfig.
Disable any applications opening at boot time. Reboot. Try to defrag.
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