defragmenting

[Ellis]

I have been making unsuccessful attempets to defrag my C
drive for the last few days. I have no programs open. I
have even shut down my screen saver. My defrag indicator
has been on for several hours and all it alternates from
0% to 1% complete. I have done this before in the past.
What am I doing wrong or does this process take hours to
complete itself? Please help with some advice, if you can.

Thank you

 

[Will Denny]

Hi

How much free space have you got on the hard disk/partition that you are trying to defrag? You will need at least 15% free space for defrag to work properly.

 

[QuietOne]

Have you checked "System information" - "Software" to see what is running?

 

[Bill Martin]

I have been making unsuccessful attempets to defrag my C

drive for the last few days. I have no programs open. I
have even shut down my screen saver. My defrag indicator
has been on for several hours and all it alternates from
0% to 1% complete. I have done this before in the past.
What am I doing wrong or does this process take hours to
complete itself? Please help with some advice, if you can.

You probably have some program running in the background. Do you have anti-
virus software running perhaps? Is there anything active in your system
tray? It sounds like some program is touching your disk periodically, which
makes the defrag give up and start over each time.

As common as this problem is, I don't know why Microsoft doesn't build a
warning into defrag telling you that it had to restart due to XXXXXX touching
the disk. Someday...

Good luck...

 

[Greg Hayes/Raxco Software]

Ellis,

You can try several things:

- Boot into Safe mode and try defragmenting from there. Does it go
"faster"?
- Look into a 3rd party defragmenter. The built-in defragmenter can be kind
of "brain-dead".

- Greg/Raxco Software
Microsoft MVP - Windows File System

Disclaimer: I work for Raxco Software, the maker of PerfectDisk - a
commercial defrag utility, as a systems engineer in the support department.