Laptop wont Defrag!! :(

Hey everyone,

Im having trouble defragmenting my hard drive on my asus w3v.

If i run the windows defragmenter, it will not defrag more than 1%. I left it for hours and it still shows 1%...

I have FAT32 harddrive, XP and nortons anti virus installed.

Does anyone know why my computer wont defrag, and if so how to fix it??

Much appreciated.

 

how much space do you have free on the drive?

 

You need at least 10% free space for the Defrag to run properly.

 

I have an 80 Gig hard drive, with about 33 gigs of free space.

 

Run checkdisk before running degragmenter. Win98 used to give such errors when the disk had some incorrect info written on it, which btw FAT32 is especially prone to do.

 

If you haven't already, you should disconnect from the Internet and turn Norton AV off.

 

yes, to piggyback on what bmwrob said, turn everything off; wifi, antivirus, anything that runs in the background. if you have something that constantly changes a file or files, defrag will keep starting over.

you could also get something like diskeeper that will defrag around this issue, but you have to pay for it.

 

thanks for the replies people.

unfortunatley i have tried disconecting the lan, wifi, and disabling nortons before running defrag, yet the problem still remains.

any more ideas?

Thanks.

 

just for giggles, maybe try booting into safe mode and then defragging?

 

A free trial version of O&O Defrag is available
here, and might work for you.

 

Ive tried to run it in safe mode but i get the same results...

I even downloaded that O&O program and left it running for a night and was only at 20% when i woke up after about 10 hours.

im completely confused. (maybe time to format back to NTSF?)

 

Like others have said it is likley some background process that is constantly accessing the HD .

I would try the F8 option booting into safe mode / command prompt and try defrag c -f

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/283080/EN-US/

-f Forces defragmentation of the volume regardless of whether it needs to be defragmented or even if free space is low

You are sure the process was running and the Laptop did not go into suspension or hybernation ? Did you check power management to make sure nothing gets turned off ?


Good Luck

 

How long has it been since you last defraged? I've always used the progam "End it All" to stop unecessary programs from running in the background, which allows the computer to defrag properly.

It can be found here: http://www.the-old-sea-dog.net/enditall.html

 

sometimes it does take a helluva long time to defrag a harddrive, maybe because you have a lot of archive files that need to decompress first, which takes forever.

Are you using the windows defrag program? or norton's speeddisk?

Don't use the two together, because they use different methods of defragging.

The windows defrag program just sets all the system files and programs to the front of the harddrive and everything else to the end, while norton speed disk organizes it depending on program usage, so programs more frequently used are put near the beginning of the drive for faster access.

Cheers,
Mike