Defragging Hard Drives

[Marknz]

Folks,

How long should a defrag of a hard drive take? Is 56+ hours and still counting a major issue?

[Joni]

Folks,

How long should a defrag of a hard drive take? Is 56+ hours and still counting a major issue?
I've never heard of that kind of time for a defrag... mine take 20 minutes'ish.

[TerminalAddict]

depends on size of hard drive, and available free space.

If the drive is near full it wil ltake ages

[Zed]

Folks,

How long should a defrag of a hard drive take? Is 56+ hours and still counting a major issue?That's taking far too long and may be a sign of bad sectors in your HardDiskDrive! How old is your HDD and what operating system are you running?

I used to purchase computer hardware and the prices have come down considerably! You should be able to buy a 80gig hdd for around $100-120, even cheaper if you know someone in the trade! Sorry I can't help, I've gone from buying pc hardware to buying plastics, metals, vinyls, paints, fasteners, machinery...:spudguita

[John]

Run a defrag at night without your anti-virus running and or interwebs connected, and make sure you dont have that dirty spyware floating around..

[Matt Bleck]

The best thing to do would be start your PC in safe mode and do a defrag.

Operating systems before XP have always had a prob with defraging due to the fact that it keeps writng to the hard, there for changing files etc, so what usually happens is it won't get past 10%.

Hope this helps.

[crashe]

Folks,

How long should a defrag of a hard drive take? Is 56+ hours and still counting a major issue?

Before you start to 'defrag' clear out your 'cookies' and your 'history'
Do a 'ad-aware' scan and also a manual 'anti virus scan' as well before 'Defrag'. Clear out any stuff that you do NOT need.

Then last thing at night before going to bed set the comuter to 'defrag'.

While you are 'defraging' do NOT use your comp for anything.
As that will upset the 'defraging'.

Now if you havent done it for a long time then yes it could take quite a long time.
It should be done as often as possible. The more you do it the quicker it will take to do.

Defragging is to put everything you have on your comp into order and make it faster to use...

[Jeremy]

Unless your using FAT32 on a computer with a 160gb hdd and only 16mb of ram + win98 than that is an incredibly long time for it to defrag.

The other posibility is that you have hardly any HDD space free. Stop the defrag and go and delete some stuff.

[Marknz]

Many thanks for the feedback folks. It's a mates PC running Win98 with 128Mg of RAM. We've now deleted cookies, deleted temporary files, deleted the history and are now running in safe mode with the defrag working. Already it seems to be running quicker and advancing along the percentage scale quicker than before.

I'll let you know how we fare.

Cheers
MArk

[Ghost Lemur]

<tuxluva>

Defrag? What's a defrag? :killingme :rofl: Mwhahahaha

Next you'll be talking about virii and spyware.

A good filesystem doesn't require defragging.

</tuxluva>

To actually be productive and helpful though, that's way too long. How full is your hard drive? Clear some space try again. But I'd suspect you've got bad sectors.

If it's really bad sometimes it's just quicker to do a clean install, just make sure you back up all your data.

[Ixion]

<tuxluva>

Defrag? What's a defrag? :killingme :rofl: Mwhahahaha

Next you'll be talking about virii and spyware.

A good filesystem doesn't require defragging.

</tuxluva>

..

Quite right. Mine doesn't. Good thing SCSI. And aint NEVER heard of a virus for AIX.

[Virago]

As mentioned above, it'll be other applications running in the background that is upsetting the defrag. My old back-up machine is running Windows 98, and it's really slow to defrag, unless I shut down everything else, including Virus Auto-protect, and most importantly the screensaver.

Any application that accesses the Hard-drive will cause the defrag to restart.