Trouble reading drive? Fragmentation or RAM problem?

[Jeff]

This has to do with my wife's older laptop (Pentium 4, 2.66Ghz, 512 MB
ram) which runs XP Home, fully updated. It has a C:\ system partition
and 2 other data partitions plus a USB drive I use for backups.

I recently tried to use Acronis's True Image 7 to back the C: partition
and noticed that it took forever "analyzing" each partition. I really
mean forever. So much so that I needed to abort it. I assumed her
partitions must be badly fragmented. So I went to the installed
"PerfectDisk" software she had on her laptop and tried to fragment it.
Again it took forever to do the analysis phase and never got much beyond
it so that I had to force it to stop.

I became very concerned. Using Windows Tools I checked the C: partition
and it also took a long time but apparently found no errors because it
sent me to notice that it found anything wrong.

I then told Windows to do a chkdsk (with both correction boxes selected)
of C: - which of course it could only do on reboot - and I rebooted. As
requested chkdsk of C: did its thing on reboot. What I noticed is that
stage 1: went by fast
stage 2: "Is verifying indexes" - stayed at 0% for a long time (2
minutes?) before proceeding to the 1-100% which then went reasonably
fast.
stage 3: "Verifying security descriptors" - same thing: stayed at 0% for
a very long time before then progressing reasonably fast from 1-100%.
stage 4: "verifying file data" did not act stuck in the pre-0% stage
like the others, but just progressed very slowly through 1-100%.
stage 5: "free space" just progressed slowly but steadily.

No errors found.

Does any of this indicate some problem? I do not recall having this
problem when I used True Image or Perfect Disk previously on her PC.

**It all started because True Image took so long in the "analyzing
partitions" phase (several minutes which never completed) that it seemed
impractical to use it for backup and then Perfect Disk defragmenter did
the same.

Jeff

 

[Jeff]

The laptop actually has 1 G of ram, not 512 MB. Sorry for the
misinformation.

Jeff

 

[Colin Barnhorst]

If the drive is nearly full all of these processes will take forever to
execute. It sounds a little like the disk might be nearly full but I'm just
guessing. PerfectDisk will work with under the recommended 15% free space
on the disk, but slowly. The problem with a nearly full disk is that
analytical processes need room for temp files while they work or they have
to take on the tasks in tinier bites.

 

[Jeff]

The drive is not nearly full, but it is only a small 40G drive with 3
partitions. C: has 5G free out of 15G, and the other partitions are much
emptier.

Anyway, I deleted a whole bunch of accumulated Windows update backup
files, and now things are somewhat faster (though still too slow).
Having gotten True Image to do full backups I am now proceeding with a
badly needed defrag. Maybe that will help things further.

MS Word and Firefox do not seem to run slow on this laptop. Just things
like True Image and the like.

Jeff

 

[Colin Barnhorst]

Word and Firefox do not have to scan the drives. Backup and defrag programs
do. That would be the main difference.

As an aside, if I may make a suggestion; in order to avoid a lot
fragmentation in the first place, don't use the Save command in Word and
Windows and use the Save As command instead. Save saves just the changed
fragment and puts it in the next available place on the drive (thus the file
is fragmented). Save As writes a whole new file (which is thus contiguous)
and deletes the old version.

 

[Jeff]

Thanks. I'll tel my wife. It's her PC.....

Jeff

 

[Bob I]

Also you may want to check for the drive falling back to PIO instead of
DMA. (Device Manager, IDE controllers, Primary IDE channel, Properties,
Advanced) Remove and reinstall the channel if that is the case.