Win 98SE Defragging.

[kfh]

Hi All,

I'm trying to Defrag a mates system.
It keeps hanging at 68%.
I've tried it in safe mode, even copied Win ME Defrag and tried.
Any ideas how to sort this one.

Thanks,

kfh.

[rahulkothari]

try scandisk from dos first, and then defrag...

[kfh]

Hi rahulkothari

I've ran scandisk from Dos no change there it's still hanging.

Thanks,

kfh.

[BigBlue66]

Maybe some program is accessing the harddrive.

Have you made sure there are no programs running in the background?

Have you tried changing the settings in Disk Defrag to only defrag the files?

[Paul Komski]

Did you get scandisk to do a full surface scan?

[kfh]

Hi All,

No not a full serface scan thats over 6 hours to run.
It did find 2 bad clusters and fixed them.

Thanks,

kfh.

[Budfred]

You may want to start up Scan disk, go out for dinner and a movie or 2 and then come back and try defrag. If it found 2 bad sectors already, I would certainly run the full scan too.

[debby]

I find running scandisk on my hards takes along time so I do it when I go to bed I also run the defrag after I go to bed this way you don't take up the whole day running they things!
:D :D

[GreenNV]

Yeah, me too Debby. Actually, I haven't done a thorough scandisk for quite sometime now. How often should one perform a thorough scandisk, btw? :(

[debby]

Originally posted by GreenNV
Yeah, me too Debby. Actually, I haven't done a thorough scandisk for quite sometime now. How often should one perform a thorough scandisk, btw? :(

I try to do it once a month, the defrag I do about every 6 months and there is one thing you might want to know for some reason Windows 98 scandisk misses up if you get a message saying scandisk has restarted and there is a program running just restart your computer and keep pressing the F8 key it will being up a screen pick safe mode and then you can run the scandisk I know this works because I had to do this too!
And just what is BTW.

:D

[GreenNV]

Okay, thanks Debby, that's good to know. Oh, and btw...btw mean 'by the way'. ;) :D

[Budfred]

I tend not to run scandisk or defrag very often, but I try to remember to run in Safe Mode when I do run them. For a long time my system was so unstable that I was reformatting and reinstalling so frequently that my hard drive didn't have time to get fragmented.

[sleddog]

Just installing Windows fragments you harddrive. Also it scatters files all over the drive partition, increasing the likelihood of more fragmentation as you install more software. The first think I do after installing Windows is move the swapfile to another partition, reboot, and defragment. Then move the swapfile back to the primary drive where, with a little bit of luck, you might get it created in one contiguous piece. I installed a fresh copy of Windows 2000 on a fdisked/formatted 20gb drive last week and the swap file created by Windows (~386mb I think) was fragmented in 17 pieces. Sheesh! Maybe it doesn't really affect performance that much, but it bugs me.

I defragment my C: drive (3.5gb FAT32, about 50% in use) every one-two weeks; it takes maybe 5 minutes. Other partitions I rarely (or never) defragment.

[Paul Komski]

One good reason for regular defragging is that it won't take very long. The longer its left - the longer the defrag will take.

[kfh]

Hi All,

Just ran a full surface scan, it took over nine hours.
Still no joy with defragging hanging in safe mode still.
Whats next.

Thanks,

kfh.

[Budfred]

I would run the hard drive maker's diagnostic software to make sure the hard drive is not fatally flawed. It sure sounds like something basic is wrong with it....