HDD-related problems

For a while recently due to causes unknown to me Defrag.exe pops up when my computer is idle and begins defragging in the background. About half an hour into it my whole system freezes, as in mouse and kb frozen. I have disabled its task and disabled boot defragging aswell as another registry tweak but I can NOT get rid of it from popping up and freezing my comp when I'm not on it. In the end I renamed Defrag.exe to DefragSTFU.exe to stop windows from finding it. It worked.

I then ran chkdsk /r /b and it said "windows replaced bad clusters on file X" several times, but at the end summary it said there are 0 KB of bad sectors, so it's kinda confusing. Repeated it and got same result.

My 2 questions: How on earth can I disable defragging when idle w/o renaming Defrag.exe, and does my HDD really have bad sectors or not?

 

Since defrag is locking up the PC, there's a good chance that you do have bad sectors and that's why chkdsk keeps reporting that it found and repaired stuff. Best bet: download a diagnostic utility from your HD manufacturer's web site and run that. Check out the Diagnostic and Drive Utilities sections here at MajorGeeks for any other helpful downloads. And... if I were you, I'd start backing up the important stuff PRONTO before the HD takes a dump. Most HD's have a 3 year factory warranty so look into RMA replacement if it fits your situation....

hopperdave2000

 

Okay my HDD is a WD 40GB Caviar, I just ran a full test with their software but that found no errors either, so whatever problems I may be having I'll attribute to Vista's drivers and sorts. Now then... about stopping Defrag... what do I do?

Btw I also enabled S.M.A.R.T. just now, just in case...

 

Didn't know you were running Vista.... I think that the defrag scheduler is set to kick in after 'X' amount of idle time. So, get into the defrag scheduler (or the task scheduler) and deactivate any defrag settings.... that's about all I can suggest as I'm not that familiar with Vista's internal workings yet....
Hope this helps!!

hopperdave2000

 

As I said earlier I already did that plus a few registry tweaks and still can't solve it, but if you can't help any further that's allright, I'll go to a Vista forum until the world familiarizes more with Vista.