[RESOLVED] defrag takes ages

[messyhead717]

i'm having problems defragging my hard drives using win98. it takes about three hours to defrag my 2.1gig drive. i've heard that in win95 it was a lot quicker. is there an update that stops it taking so long or is it just a win98 thing. i've got a PII 300 so i don't think it's anyhting to do with processor speed.

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MeSsY :-)

[confus-ed]

Is this every time you run it?, until you've run defrag acouple of times in 98 it can be slow as it is trying to re-arrange your files into the order in which they are used most, it is also resizing your swap file so it thinks the drives contents have changed and starts over and over again. Make sure nothing else is running and go to the pub while while it sorts itself out, if it takes a long time the only simple thing you can do is set a permanent swap file to stop it.

The reason why 95 was generally faster is that certainly early builds were using fat16 rather than fat 32 so your files had a tendency to be less fragmented, it also wasn't trying to order them by use.

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[Eagle PC Diagnostech]

Defrag in Windows 98 takes a long time, depending on how much data is on your hard drive. I can believe it could take 3 hours.
Just an example: Clean install of Windows 98 and Office 97 only, on a 4.3GB hard drive will take about an hour to do the defrag completely.

[luked]

Does scandisk restart several times before it completes? It would restart due to accesses to the hard disk by other tasks.

Perhaps your computer loads additional tasks during boot, such as schedulers, virus scanners, findfast, etc. which are interfering with the Defrag operation. Try turning off or disabling everything in the system tray (next to the clock), and killing the findfast task in the Ctrl-Alt-Del task list before your next attempt. It seemed to help me, but I wasn't paying close attention to the times.



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David Luke
Opinions expressed are not necessarily those of my employer...especially regarding working conditions.

[bill alward]

check this site
http://support.microsoft.com/support/windows/serviceware/win98/E9S88A5NZ.ASP

[kannibul]

try using the tech tip -'super defrag'
it starts defrag before anything starts in 98 and locks out all the other programs until it is done.
it is on the windows 98 cd - under the directory x:\tools\msutil
right click and select install on the defrag icon
it will run defrag on the next startup of windows (and only this time - until you do it again)

[physjcirl]

Try gettting norton utilities or some symantec product and use the defrag it is far more efficient, however if you are genuinely fond of the order in which the files are put you may wish to continue waiting for hours..the symantec product puts programs which are not frequently used at the end of the disk..whereas yours holds them to find a place at the end of the other more frequently used data......pronounced daa..taa

[This message has been edited by physjcirl (edited September 05, 1999).]

[Grogan]

You can also run defragmenter in safe mode, if it keeps starting over due to disk writes.

Grogan

[Frithiof]

Try looking in
C:\WINDOWS\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\Content.IE5\
C:\WINDOWS\TEMP
C:\WINDOWS\Temporary Internet Files

These three subdirectories had over 10000 files in them. Most of them puny! The whole lot didn't even amount to 70Mb. Some 7600 files in the first lot!

[Mike Carmody]

I had the same problem and have switched to
Norton Utilities. Defragmenting now takes
about 10 mintues. I will never go back to
Win 98's defragmenter.