Deframentation of the hard drive

[DLeonR]

Can someone please help me on this problem?
I am working on my daughter-in-law’s computer; she has a Compaq 5000 with windows xp home edition. It was running real slow because, the hard drive was almost maxed out. She has a Seagate 40 gig HHD and all that was left free was a little over 750 mb. Only 256 mgs of ram and a Pentium Celeron processor. I cleaned up the drive as much as I could, found 13 Trojan horses (viruses) and deleted them, all went well until I tried to defragment the drive, it was so badly fragmented that when you hit the analyze, the bar was almost completely red. At first it would not let me defragment the drive because I had to have at least 15% of the drive free, to do so. So I deleted as many unnecessary files as possible. When I resumed defragmentation, it would run for a while then say it completed defragmentation, yet the bar is still red with fragmented files. What else can I do to completely defragment the HHD?

[Rick]

It sounds like it has reached the limits with the free space available

I would install a second hard drive
Move ALL data files to that drive

Then do one of two things
First do a clean install of the OS and other programs

Or do a defrag

I for one don't use defrag unless it is the ONLY option

[Paul Komski]

If you are determined to totally defragment the drive and you do have at least that 15% free space you could remove the drive and defragment it slaved to another PC (running an NT-based OS if the format is NTFS). You might also be able to get a plug-in for a BartPE CD and use that.

You could also use Knoppix or other Live CD to copy all files to another (say external USB) drive with the same file format and then copy them all back again. Preferably you would wipe the drive in the interim and use a windows installation CD to reformat the drive (without completing a full reinstall) before copying the files back to the empty reformatted partition.

Regardless of what you attempt (a clean reinstall would be best) I would suggest you run chkdsk /R from a command prompt and reboot to allow for all error-checking and the disk's surface to be checked.

Running with an almost full drive is always going to be a bit slow - particularly with that amount of RAM and bear in mind that an already heavily fragmented drive or one that is pretty full actually of themselves increase and enhance any further fragmentation - a nasty feedback loop - so getting a new larger drive might be wise if you want to retain all of what is currently on the drive.

Some other defrag utils (http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?showtopic=7060) are a possibility including DefragNT/DefragXP (http://www.geocities.com/andreigaceff/DefragNT.html) a small executable that purportedly can run as a simple exe (no plugin needed) from a BartPE CD.

PS I just tried DefragNT and it seems pretty buggy - so backup before using it would be my advice if it was on the cards in the first place.

[DLeonR]

I thank you guys for your kind reply. I think I will try the slave procedure, it is more to my ability. I need to get this done soon. I will take the drive out of her computer and put is mine as a slave then try to defragment it. I also have windows xp pro in my computer.