Should it take this long??

I have just recently become a mobile gamer (2 years ago). I have much experience biulding and tinkering with desktops. I have never ever seen a hard drive take this long to defrag. I have owned my G1 for a little over a month now and have installed a total of 5 games on it. I thought I would perform some disk maintanence on it and ran the windows defragger.....it looked as though someone had thrown a digital grenade into my hard drive. So I start defragging........ 28 hours later......still going.......

Do laptops normally take this long to defrag? Only 47% of the drive is full...

I can't even imagine how the drive became so fragmented. I almost want to say it came that way directly from Asus.

 

I dont think that's normal. My drive is by no means completely fragged... but when I defrag, it takes no longer than half an hour at the most. Usually 10 mins is average

 

Something fishy...... Even a drive with 10% free space, fragmented like hell, took less than an hour and a half, on my dad's old thinkpad(pentium M, to boot)
Is your drive FAT32, by any chance?

 

I suspect there is another program in the background which is making changes to the disk. If the defrag program senses enough of a change, it'll restart from the beginning, locking it into somewhat of an infinite loop. The more full the disk, the more likely you'll run into the problem, since the amount of time it takes to get to where it was is that much more.

 

I was concerned that something may be running in the background as well. I went into MSCONFIG and I have disabled nearly every startup program including Norton. I turned off the screensaver and double checked Windows Task Mananger to make sure nothing else started without my consent. I have no idea what is wrong.

I have now givin up on trying to use the windows defragger and I am now trying JKdefrag. It seems to be getting the job done.

 

Start your computer in safe mode, then run the defrag.

 

I wouldn't really advise that (what the previous poster said).

safe mode usually (always?) disables DMA, which means HDD access is horribly slow.

 

doesnt the xp g1 come as fat32 with a little icon to reformat to ntfs

fat is horribly slow defraggin... i bet thats what your problem is...

it should take minutes... not hours

 

Alrighty, where should I start. The G1 hdd comes partitioned into a C and D drive with the operating system installed on C of course. D drive is labeled data. There is a short cut that comes with the G1 to convert to NTFS, only the D drive partition. Not C drive. To convert the C drive to NTFS that has XP on it is more difficult is seems. But I digress. The D drive partition of the hdd defragged rather quickly without any fuss, yet still after many hours and attempts, C drive refuses to defrag. It's as if something in that actually partition is screwing it up. I am getting really close to just doing a low level reformat of the entire drive and starting from scratch.....

 

Download Auslogic defragger.

 

On my G1 I use Diskeeper and the defrag time is less than half an hour. On another system at home, I know that the windows defrag just doesn't work, since it always gets interrupted and ends up restarting the defragging process. I would suspect that might be the case for you. Unfortunately, I don't know how windows defrag performs on my G1 since I installed Diskeeper right from the beginning. So, I would suggest you get a dedicated defragging program; windows defrag usually takes longer than other programs anyways...

 

You can check out Raxco Perfectdisk 8, works great.

http://www.raxco.com

 

Thank you all very much for your support and advice. I was finally able to get the C partition defragged and optimized. I had to use a combination of programs to do it. Auslogic defragged the drive nice and quick. As it defrags, it tells you what file it is working on. Based on this, I was able to see what was causing it to hang up. Thankfully most of the files that where fragmented and causing problems where unnessecary and where deleted. Once Auslogic finished the defrag, I then used JKdefrag to optimize the drive.

Thank you all again

 

I can confirm that defrag is 10 times slower on FAT32 than NTFS. You should convert to NTFS and use the builtin defragmenter next time.

There is a guide on the web telling you how to convert properly, google converting fat32 to ntfs.

 

Are we talking XP or Vista. I defragmented last night, well and the morning cos it took that long. I started at about 9 and at 2am i gave in and went to bed. was done by the morning. Stupid vista defrag doesn't show the picture anymore just a nice vague message "defrag may take a few minuted to a few hours". And it does the whole drive together, no option to only select C:


But 28 hours, something must be wrong there....

 

I was talking XP.

If that's the level of information in the Vista defragmenter... well, let's just say another reason for me not to upgrade to Vista in the near future.

Even on a hugely fragmented C: drive with more than 100 000 files took less than an hour on NTFS / XP Pro.