On my P166, 2g hd, 64mb ram running win98 I had the age old repeated restarts when trying to defrag. So I went to MS site and found the info to defrag in Safe Mode. That works O.K but it's a bit of a hassle on a regular basis. Recently I tried the weekly scheduled maintenance in win98 Maintenance Wizard. This does Disk Cleanup followed by Scan Disk and finally Defrag. Amazing, defrag runs without restarts even when connected to the net and with my e-mail left open. Am I just lucky or have some of you guys ran Maintenance Wizard with the same results ??? I have not seen this posibility mentioned in any other Defrag Questions/Answers.
Please comment !!!
Tanzie
The Old Fart

LUCKY ?!? -- I G*U*E*S*S!!!

Gee, Mike, why not download something too, while all this is going on? http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/biggrin.gif

The usual cause for stops and restarts when running Defrag is either:

....Anti-Virus checking is enabled
....Other programs are loaded in Startup

If you're defragging successfully while online, with e-mail open,
seems like you're without virus protection, which is quite a risk
to take just to get your drive defragged. This is not a good idea.

I'd recommend you disable all startup items except SysTray and Explorer,
and then run ScanDisk and Defrag. See if it will run all the way through.



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"I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."
-- Charles Babbage, mathematician, computer pioneer, analytical engine designer (1791-1871)

Missed one major cause -- SCREENSAVERS http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/biggrin.gif

Power management settings can also have an effect on Defrag.

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"I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."
-- Charles Babbage, mathematician, computer pioneer, analytical engine designer (1791-1871)

I was watching this one cuz I didn't even know that Defrag would run with anything else going. Our first "gift from someone" puter was the same config as yours, and when we would ScanDisk sometimes, we would get this whiney message along the lines of "I've had to stop 6 times because something else is using power! Turn off all other programs." I would check and there would be nothing else running...just Explorer and Systray. Geez. So I have never tried running anything else while running the various maintenance tools.