Defragging a Dual Boot system with Diskeeper 2008

Hi guys

I'm dual booting XP and Vista and I have Diskeeeper 2008 installed on both OS's.

I manually defragged in XP using Diskeeper the the other day, and I've just gone to check the disk fragmentation in Vista and the disks I've got are in need of defragging again :wtf:

Is this just an OS thing where one OS thinks the disks are fragged to pieces and the other is now confident they aren't because I've manually defragged them in that OS?

Am I going to encounter any problems defragging in both OS's so that both OS's show the disks as being defragged?

Thanks in advance for any advice/help

 

Probably need a little more info....are your two operating systems on two separate partitions?

It is probably a combination of things...

When defragmenting a disk from within an OS (defrag xp partition while XP is running from within XP) there are files that are in use that cannot be defragmented.

And the same applies from VISTA.

Also, especially with VISTA there is a fair amount of disk shuffling going on as Vista tries to optimize your harddrive during down times so often used files are placed at the front of the disk for faster access. Since XP is not privy to this information (most often used files by vista) it is probably moving those files around again because diskkeeper doesn't know those files are optimized FOR VISTA.

Also, have you set your pagefile(s) to a fixed size? Since by default both XP and Vista use dynamically sized paged files, they are always growing and shrinking...a highly optimized disk may actually lead to a fragmented pagefile since the files are quickly surrounded on both sides by other files as they are written--two grow, the page file needs to therefore place a second or third part in a nonsequential way--your defragmenter will see this right away and start moving files around to put this in the same place.

What does this all mean? Don't worry about it. 1% or 3% fragmentation is not hurting your performance but diskkeeper will still do its darndest to clean it up

 

That's weird. In my setup, when I run JKDefrag in Vista, it also automatically defrags XP at the same time. I've never had a problem with that so far.

 

Ok a little bit more info then.

I have Vista and XP Home SP2 installed. XP Home SP2 is installed on X partition (XP actually sees it as F while I've named it X in Vista) and Vista is on the C partition.

I have a D partition as well which is a storage partition only, i.e. nothing vital to system operation on it.

All partitions are on the one physical drive.

When I defragged in XP I defragged all three partitions, Vista, XP and the spare D partition.

When I went to look at them in Vista, Diskeeper showed that all three were fragged?

Seems odd to me. But as long as it's not going to cause issues between OS's then I won't worry...