Defragging 40GB drive

[Issachar]

Using a HP Pavilion, 300Mhz AMD, 128M SDRAM, Windows 98.

Came with a 4GB HD. Used Norton Ghost to copy it to a WD 40GB-7200 HD.
Everything works fine except defrag. This is my second drive. The first was as above, only IBM. I thought the drive was defective so I bought the WD and it does the same thing.
Defrag looks totally normal, but around 10%, it crashes. I have to do an improper power down, reboot... blah, blah, blah...

Why would this be? Every app works fine. Scandisk works fine. Only defrag won't.

Both drives had formatted out to about 38.x GB.

Thanks for any thoughts.

Issachar

[Fruss Tray Ted]

First, if there were problems on your original disk, what you've managed to do is copy the problems. But it may be the fact you have a screen saver or other 'ditty' that kicks in after a certain time. If not:

Go back to your 4 gig disk, making sure AV is up to date, run all the diagnostic tools you can muster up. I assume you have Norton's Utilities because you have Ghost. I'd start with 'One Button Checkup', correct all it will do succesfully, then run 'Norton's Disk Doctor' and end with 'Speed Disk' (NDD will do Speed Disk anyway and it is a faster 'DeFrag' than Windows, better too).

You could try a Windows 98 boot floppy and run a DOS ScanDisk to see where any errors MAY be on the Hard-drive.

You could ALSO try going to the HDD's website and running their disk utility to see if it has problems too. One of these tries 'should' find something... but there's probably other things to try also.

Please post back results, I'm curious to know if any of it works, thanks.

[pawprint]

Start up your computer into safe mode , disable screen saver if running, and run defrag
cheers, ~pawprint~

[Issachar]

I'll try as much of the above that I can. I'll have to see what I have.
(I definitely have "safe mode" :) )
Before I did anything, especially with Ghost, I made sure I had the absolute latest, greatest Norton AV stuff and did a full scan on my 4 gig. I didn't want anything buggy being copied.
The 4 gig works fine, including defrag.
I don't run anything in the background that is not essential, especially screen savers, schedulers, etc.
If there is any bright side to this, it's that my IBM 40GB is probably fine after all and once I find the problem here, I can put that in too and have two 40GB. (I do a lot of graphics/video stuff so more is better.)

I'll get back to here as soon as I can.

Thanks, Issachar