12hrs to defragment 5.9mb drive!!

[Scottie Dog]

I have just completed defragmenting my hard drive, the first time it has been done for around 4 months.

What I find hard to believe is that it took about 12 hours ro complete. Is this normal?

For info I only have a 5.99Gb drive, run W98 with a Pentium II processor and have 64Mb RAM.

Thanks for any comments.

Scottie Dog

[Spitoon]

It's a while since I used that sort of configuration but I don't think it's necessarily out of the question. Defrag speed is dependent on the processor speed, the amount of fragmentation on the disk and disk access speed - I guess there can be an awful lot of data being moved around.

If you haven't defragged the disk before (or for a while) you could probably expect it to take some time - try running defrag again, it should be much faster this time because there's not much defragmentation on the disk.

All this is based on my experience rather than a sound understanding of how Defrag works - so I'll defer to anyone who can give a technically correct answer.

[maxell]

12 hrs does seem a little long to defrag a drive that size even with windows 98,
suspect it is because the defrag was continualy restarting because of something writing to the disc .
Try it in safe mode or better still have a look at This (http://www.compprime.com/scandisk.htm) it may speed the defrag up in future

[PPRuNe Pop]

I de-fragged my 20gb this morning and it took 15 minutes. It usually does so don't know what might be causing your problem. Do you use Windows own or a bought in programme? I do de-frag once a week and that helps I am sure. 12 hours is far too long. Try it again in a week and if it takes 12 hours again I would investigate further.

[Binoculars]

I suppose you deactivated your anti-virus program before you started? Can be a real bummer that one, but in my case the defrag would never have been completed if I hadn't figured out what was causing it to restart every 20 minutes or so.

[BRL]

Hi there. Start up in safe mode and try it then...?

[Scottie Dog]

Thanks for the input

I will try it in Safe Mode and see if it is any quicker.

Yes, I think that I had closed everything down - I had certainly closed all of the programmes in the right-hand tray - and I can shut down AVG. I had not however turned off the screen saver.

When I was watching the progress at around 75pc it was doing one 'block' (sorry not technical) a second when it was going through free space with occasional blocks of 'to be moved to the end'.

I'll let you know how it goes.

Scottie Dog

[allthatglitters]

Also the length of time taken my be due to the drive being almost full, little or insufficient space to defragment with.

[Scottie Dog]

Managed a defrag in 1 hour using Safe Mode.

Yes, I am down to 1.1Gb free of the 5.9, so I suppose it could be running near critical.

Thanks again for the suggestions.

[Ausatco]

The defragger in Win98 is ssllooww. The one in Win ME is heaps faster and compatible with 98. PM me if you need more info, though there's plenty available via Google.

Also, even better, is Diskeeper. Version 7 Lite is quite fabulous and free. Can help you with that too via PM. Not sure if it's still available via download.

AA