Disk Defrag

[John O Keeffe]

I've tried to run the disk defragmentation but it only gets to 10percent and restarts telling me the drives contents have changed.
Could it be theres something running in the backround i don't know about?

[Jon Light]

John---there was a pretty recent thread about the things you need to do before defragging. The one that I can attest to from experience is that you must disable your screen saver---when it kicks in it interrupts the process and sends you back to the beginning.

[FIONA TOMANY]

Try defraging in safe mode mode. Press F8 on boot up then the option of safe mode should load one hting about safe mode is it will defrag lot quicker. Run scan disc at the same time. Have you by chance downloaded Go Zilla as this prgramme plays havoc with scan disc and defrag. Im afraid removing it only cause more problems. I removed it from my od computer and it removed all my DLL files

[Michael Garnett]

John-

I'd almost guarantee there's something running that's writing to the hard drive. You need to disable any program or feature that has the capability of writing doing so. Disable any power saving features, such as disk, monitor, or computer standby, including the screen saver. Next, unplug the computer from any outside connections (internet, etc). I had a computer that would never defrag because it would check for e-mail every 5 minutes. Then, disable any unnecessary peripheral software running down in the right corner of the screen (virus scan, etc.)

The way the defragmenter works is, it takes a digital "photograph" of the entire hard drive. Then it goes around and picks out files and re-sorts them all the way up to the "front" of the disk. Any time the computer writes something new on the disk, the defrag software has to start completely over with taking a new "photograph." That's why you are having trouble.

[Steve Alonzo Walker]

I Disable My Norton Antivirus And Then Defrag and When It's Finished, I reactivate Norton From My Program Files.