defragmenting problem

I started windows defrag and found most of my hard drive shown red, after defrag I was left with about 80% of the free space shown in red. have tried defragging several times since with windows and auslogics but no change. I even tried putting the drive in a caddy and defragging on another computer but nothing seems to make any difference. the computer seems to work ok, but is it likely that im heading for a bigger problem?

 

Welcome to Major Geeks
You could download a third party defragger. My favorite is the Ultimate Defrag. I use the free domain version.
Another good one is IObit's.

 

You said that most of your hard drive showed red indicating fragmentation. Does that mean your hard drive is full or pretty darn close? If so, then you need to free up some space on your hard drive by uninstalling programs you no longer use, moving data to flash drive or an external USB or ext SATA drive, burning to CD/DVD -- whatever backup possibilities you have and know how to use.

In addition you can empty your Recycle Bin and then reduce the amount of space reserved for its use to free up some more hard drive space. Once you've been able to defrag successfully you can then restore the size of the recycle bin to its previous setting if you feel you need to.

There can be a wide difference in the speed and effectiveness of various defragging software. But if the drive you wish to defrag is close to full there won't be enough space for any defragger to work very well. This will result in long defrag times that may still leave lots of files fragmented. Or else you'll get very short defrag times and virtually no improvement in your level of fragmentation because the defragger just doesn't have enough space on the drive to work.

When is a hard drive too full? Open My Computer and right click on the drive you wish to defrag. If it shows 90% or more full that's liable to be a problem, depending on the total capacity of the drive. If the drive is relatively small even 80% may prevent effective defragging while if you have, say, one of the new 1 1/2 Terrabyte hard drives you might still be able to defrag even if the drive is 95% full.

1) Which version of Windows are you running; 2) what size is your hard drive; and 3) how much empty space do you still have on the drive?

 

Correct. For a proper defrag,you should have at least 10% free disk space.

 

according to windows defrag I have 69% free space. I have just used ultimate defrag and it has turned all the free space to blue which seems to indicate contiguous files

 

Try starting Ultimate Defrag again, but do not run. Click on Analyze and see what percentage fragmentation you have.

 

Agree about Ultimate Defrag, it really helps on slower machines as you can move rarely used archives to the inside center of the disk speeding access time to the files you use frequently by placing them on the outside. Should also run chkdsk c:/r from a command prompt before doing a defrag, assuming that c is where Windows is installed and that is the drive you will be defragmenting. Also may want to run CCleaner and cleanmgr /sageset:50 and then cleanmgr /sagerun:50 from start>Run before hand as well. I also delete the hidden Windows Update uninstaller folders from time to time in the Windows folder to save on disk space, and then clean the registry with CCleaner and then defrag it with NTREGOPT.
Bug

 

Still haven't figured out about the color change.
Empty free space is white.

 

i have analysed the hard drive with both windows defrag and ultimate defrag and (hopefully) attached screenshots to this message, maybe someone can make some sense of them.

 

I have had a few glitches occur with Ultimate Defrag where it shows 25+% fragmented. Upon running, shows completed and still 25%.
Removed Ultimate Defrag and re-installed. Then shows correct amount.
How do you have your page file set up (sizewise)?
How often does a Restore Point get created?

 

restore points are created most days but space is limited to 3% of the drive. page file is set to 2048mb. it is running xp sp3, 80gig hd

 

Get a copy of WinDirStat and run it to see what is taking up that much space.

 

use diskkeeper 30 day trial

 

I have run ccleaner and also the wipe free space option and the tried windows defrag analyse but there is no change in the result...then I ran windirstat. I have attached the result.

 

Are you holding any audio or video files on your drive? They can really eat up space.
If the rest of the right side of your WinDirStat screenshot is on a par with what is showing, you have a HECK of a lot of files. Spyware scans must be a b..ch.

 

Maybe try Defraggler. I was using Iobits Defragmenter a while back and loved it. One day it started acting up (Did a defrag, but once done, it always showed the same amount of fragmentation). I used Defraggler and it worked like a charm, been using it eversince.

 

no audio files and only half a dozen 2 minute video files

 

The following instructions are a copy/paste from MS support.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/315265

I recommend the orange option, let it run at reboot, and it should fix your orphans
and sort things out for you.




Manual steps to run Chkdsk from My Computer or Windows Explorer

1. Double-click My Computer, and then right-click the hard disk that you want to check.
2. Click Properties, and then click Tools.
3. Under Error-checking, click Check Now. A dialog box that shows the Check disk options is displayed,
4. Use one of the following procedures:
* To run Chkdsk in read-only mode, click Start.
* To repair errors without scanning the volume for bad sectors, select the Automatically fix file system errors check box, and then click Start.
* To repair errors, locate bad sectors, and recover readable information, select the Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors check box, and then click Start.
Note If one or more of the files on the hard disk are open, you will receive the following message:
The disk check could not be performed because the disk check utility needs exclusive access to some Windows files on the disk. These files can be accessed by restarting Windows. Do you want to schedule the disk check to occur the next time you restart the computer?
Click Yes to schedule the disk check, and then restart your computer to start the disk check.

Good Luck... sorry just saw chkdsk already suggested.

 

the diskkeeper 30 day trial when i installed it i had 48% framentation when its trial ended i had 2%

sounds like enough said to me rofl

 

30 days to defrag 46% ? Way too slow.

 

.... wow. Way too slow

 

actualy slow ram plus family constantly stopping it on me slowed it down alot but it worked pretty well

i give it about 4.6/5

 

tried all suggested solutions including chkdisk. all say there is no problem but free space still shows as contiguous files so i am currently using my install disc to repair the windows installation to see if there is some sort of corruption in windows itself.

 

repair completed but made no difference to the defrag result so now on to drastic measures and i am reinstalling xp and formatting the hard drive.

 

Good luck.Keep us posted on the outcome.

 

If Ultimate Defrag is showing empty space as blue it may just be that the color key has gotten screwed up somehow. You might click the Tools drop down menu -- Options and then select the Advanced tab and click on "Reset to default" and see if the resulting display makes more sense.

Or were you getting contiguous files showing in what should have been free space no matter which defragger you tried?

Guess if you're reformatting all this is moot now.

 

Sorry, but I only just now looked at your screen shots :-o referenced by you (see quote above) and I don't see what the problem is. You have quite a bit of free space showing in both screen shots. The fact that it's all the same color doesn't mean it's contiguous files -- rather it's contiguous free space. And I think the display from the Windows defragger doesn't show anything but gray in the bottom Window ("Estimated disk usage after defragmentation") because the disk doesn't need any further defragmentation and so it won't look any different even if you defrag it again.

I don't see any red or orange anywhere in either screen shot except maybe 1 or 2 clusters in the UltimateDefrag display and that's nothing to be concerned about. Probably those will disapper if you run UltimateDefrag again (guess you probably already have by now).

Am I missing something? Probably am, as it's quite late. Let me know. :zzz But again, if you've really already reformatted the drive I guess there's not much to be done. But I would like to know what I'm not understanding as the two screen shots look fine to me at the moment, at least. :confused

 

I also cannot see a problem. From the screenshots, I would assume that everything is hunky-dory. A reformat probably isn't necessary.

 

to Eezak
I use Ultimate Defrag and adjust the various catagory colors to my liking, but there is NO option for changing the color of the free space.
Could just be an adjustment out of line on the monitor.

 

Right hrlow2 -- I didn't notice that the color of the free space couldn't be altered.

I'm afraid it's all moot this time around for tergriff since he posted:

"repair completed but made no difference to the defrag result so now on to drastic measures and i am reinstalling xp and formatting the hard drive."

Really don't think there was anything wrong with his drive or the defraggers. Maybe once he's re-installed XP he'll report back, see these last few posts, and let us know.

 

I have now reinstalled xp and have most of my files etc back, before reinstalling I tried removing files and programs individually to see if that had any effect. The files generally transferred and deleted but about half of the programs refused to uninstall using add+remove,if I clicked on delete the screen flickered once then did nothing else,however I was able to remove them using a third party program.
I think if I had left things as they were I might have had more serious problem before long and since this is my work machine I dont think there was any alternative.
many thanks to all who took time to try and help me with this problem,if anyone else encounters anything similarI would be interested to see how they resolve it.
I have attached before and after screenshots of defrag analysis.

 

I can change the color of my free space in UltimateDefrag from white to anything else I choose. Maybe I me having the paid version is the reason.

 

@ tergriff It does sound like something had gone badly wrong with your Windows installation or the hard drive MFT or something if you had so many programs you couldn't install with the Windows uninstall routine. Still, I'm wondering what I didn't understand about your earlier screenshots that, as I wrote above, looked fine to me.

@ buck nekid I imagine that's the differnce as I am using the free version of Ultimate Defrag. What other differences are there between the free and current pay version, if you know? I like the free UD and not being able to change the color used to indicate free space doesn't bother me at all, but I'd be interested to know what else you get for paying for it. Guess I should check out their website and see for myself what they have to say.

 

Well, I will tell you this, if I had to do it again, I would of stuck with the free version, I didn't notice enough to justify it. I don't believe it is missing anything that is essential. The Disktrix website doesn't list a breakdown of the differences. The main thing I have noticed: It's prettier...