Ultimate Defrag nails HDD?

I'm not asking for help here - it's already done... what I'd like to know at this point is... WTF happened?

Basically, I was getting ready to do some cleaning on a "retired" computer, and thought I'd just go through the standard maintenance / speed-up steps after deleting a bunch of old "user" files.

I started a defrag, then realized it was not the Ultimate I've been using. Canceled it and went to get Ultimate Defrag. I'd used Ultimate a time or two, and it seemed to be quicker and more effective than the Windoze default... so I d/l'ed it, installed, and fired it up. It asked me if I wanted to turn off boot optimize - I said no. I ran the analysis, which showed only about 15 or 20 of the 160GB used, but with some fragmenting. What the hell, let it clean up. It started up, and I turned to other things. A little while (maybe 10 minutes or so - I was busy and not keeping track) later, I noticed it was rebooting, which I thought was odd. It didn't reboot, it hung with the Windows XP logo and progress bar. Oooops. I tried to reboot again, and went for Safe, with networking. No go, it hung with "mup.sys" showing as the last thing. Tried several times with various selections of safe or last. No go. Popped in the Win CD with an eye to "repair" install. The partitioning info was "unknown". Dammit. Tried a quick format, which went through with no errors, but it hung while installing. Tried again, it got about halfway through copying and announced that it couldn't find "win.com". Retry. Onward... for awhile, got to 90-some% and announced another not-found. Retry no go, re-spin CD no go. Started over, didn't like the partition again. Let it do a full format, and it finally went through. I have a bunch of stuff to install, so I'm going to do that now...

The only things I can think of right off hand are:

(1) there really is something wrong with the HDD (but I saw no evidence of it before);

(2) the canceled regular defrag hosed it (I'm not sure what it was - it was an icon labeled Defrag, so although it looked like the regular defrag, I'm not 100% sure it was the M$ defrag, and at this point I don't think there's any way to find out one way or the other);

(3) having a USB-drive stick plugged in confused things.

Any ideas?

 

It is a real PITA but I do it on occasion, should run check disk before a defragment. I usually open a command prompt and type in chkdsk c:/r. I run it for all internal and external HDDs about once a month, or after power loss while the operating system is loaded

 

Never run into this myself, and I use UltimateDefrag( Free Domain version) and have been very happy with the results.
Don't believe UD caused your problems. Could well have been the hard stop on the defrag you were running at the time.
Sorry I can't help, but good luck and best wishes.

 

Hi shorttex,

I would say that all of the above had it's part to play in your missfortune. Stopping a defrag abruptly can cause problems, and having a USB key plugged in probabaly didn't make things any easier...with the slow down and the extra load on the computer.

Glad to hear that all is well again. :clap

 

My gut feeling is that it was the source... although it did have a "cancel" button. I probably shoulda knowed better, but what the hell, you live and you learn. Well, you live, anyway. I mighta paid more attention if the computer had been one of mine, but it was a hand-me-down from an office that replaces its computers every year, need-to or not, so I really didn't care a hell of a lot about what was on it. It's probably a Good Thing that it was burned down, anyway - not much of a loss except for the time to reinstall Windoze.

I may burn it down again and put Ubuntu on it - I just got a Ubuntu box at home, and it's definitely hot stuff - I've done Red Hat/Fedora since about 5, and Suse 9 &10, but I have to say I like the Ubuntu (Gnome gui) quite a lot - it sees my Windoze as well as the Linux/Samba shares with no screwing around, and so far everything on it works pretty damn nicely... guess I'm going to have to dive into Wine before too long.

Thanks for the response.

 

As noted elsewhere, that's my take on it.

Thanks for the response.

 

Good point - I can't recall the last time I actually ran a chkdsk - I'm pretty sure the Windoze version had a number starting with "9" in it, though...

Thanks for the response and the tip.