Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with defrag

Defragging problems

ricochet biscuit — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 07:35:31 -0800

I have a Toshiba laptop running Vista (alas) and a recent spate of problems (extremely slow operations, mostly) seemed to have possibly been caused by fragmentation. I tried defragging, with mixed success. This is my work computer. I checked the properties of the hard drives and for the defrag option, it seems to be set up to do this automatically weekly at 1:00 am (when the thing is never in use, of course). Just to be sure, I manually started the defrag when I left Monday evening and when I came in Tuesday morning it was still going (fifteen hours later). I stopped the defrag and worked. Yesterday I took the afternoon off and worked from home,again starting the cycle when I left. 22 hours later when I came in again, it was still in progress.

I see a couple of possibilities. One is that the weekly automated one is not happening, and the machine has not been defragged in two years, which might explain the time it is taking now. A cowroker suggests that when I am doing the defrag now, when I leave it alone for a few minutes it is going into sleep mode and so is not doing any real defragging.

Any suggestions?

Screensaver Scheduler

edbyford — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 01:50:36 -0800

I want to only have my screensaver come on during certain parts of the day, but still want to have JKDefrag running. I have an LG Flatron LCD screen, and I have just discovered Rainmeter. So now I have a big fat clock (the SUPERCOLOSSAL skin) sitting on my desktop, which I'd like to be able to see all day.

BUT previously, I've had my screensaver set up to be JKDefrag, with it powering down my monitor after 30 mins (so that if I fall asleep while watching a movie, the screen isn't on all night).

So - what I would like is for my screensaver/power saving only to be active during the night (between, say, midnight and 8am). I don't think I can use Task Scheduler for this, as if I'm still using my computer at midnight, then it'll interrupt me - and if I start using it after midnight, when I stop using it I want the screensaver to run.

This is less important than the point above, but I would also like JKDefrag to be able to run throughout the day (when I'm not using my computer). I know I could use Task Scheduler to set it to run when idle, but that seems messy. Could I run it in the background/hidden?

Thanks in advance

Best hard drive practice?

edbyford — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 05:51:48 -0800

Is CHKDSK actually any good? I had a problem a few months ago where my hard drive started corrupting my files. I don't blame chkdsk for this, but when I was trying to sort out how I could recover some of these files, somebody implied that all chkdsk did was mark the sector bad, rather than try and save what is on there. Is this true? If so, isn't it a pretty bad hard disk checker?

Now, my hard drive contains many many photos, music and video files, which I want to make sure don't get corrupted or damaged in any way. What would you recommend I use or do to check my files over and make sure they're ok?

TIA.

Defrag an iPod?

grabbingsand — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 07:25:28 -0800

To defrag or not to defrag (an iPod)? For the most part, my 5th gen iPod has been behaving. However, when recording (using an Xtrememac MicroMemo), I will get the occasional instance of "lost time," as if seconds-long bits of conversation have been cut out. I've a feeling that this is occurring during occasional hard drive spin-ups. So I've been considering an iPod defrag. Opinions online conflict with one another, and most iPod defrag debates are three or four years old, so I'm turning to the AskMe hivemind for the current skinny.

Additional iPod info: 5th gen, 30GB (27GB used), Windows formatted.

What happens if the power fails during defrag?

davehat — Sun, 10 Sep 2006 12:43:02 -0800

I need to de-frag an external drive, but the power where I live is very flaky. Would a power failure cause me to lose my data? I have a 200gb Maxtor Onetouch II and it's very fragmented and is starting to slow down noticeably. I want to de-frag it, but we average about 1-2 power cuts every day or so here in Kisumu and I'm worried id this happens during the process, it will ruin the drive.

Should I go ahead and de-frag, or am I certain to corrupt my drive in the event of power failure?

Please help me move my files from overloaded laptop to external drives

thewhynotgirl — Tue, 01 Nov 2005 10:41:02 -0800

I've overfilled my laptop and want to move files to external drives. But moving keeps getting stopped for various reasons (and what the hell is a cyclic redundancy??) and I'm going nuts. Please send me your speed tips and procedure suggestions! The specifics: Toshiba satellite running windows xp; total c drive size 55.8gb, free space 12.6. External drives: f (in fat 32 which I'd like to reformat to ntfs) has a capacity of 152gb, and has only 66.1 free. Newest drive g (i've just formatted it to ntfs) has a capacity of 111gb, with 103 left after my abortive attempts to put an image disc of c on it. Thanks ... I'd LOVE to move all from c to f or g, then wipe c and reinstall only what I use regularly, keeping movable media on f or g to use while working on c or listening on e (1 gb flash mp3). But c is heavily fragged, f is pretty full but not formatted to ntfs (but you know ... it accesses much faster than my ntfs drives ...). Defragging is taking days, image mapping is too and keeps stopping; direct moving runs me into the cannot move due to cyclic redundancy nightmare; I have no screen saver running but wonder if it all stops when the screen blanks ... and I can get no speed to DO MY WORK while it's defragging or (trying to) image map.

Thus, I've had g for 2 weeks now and still have not emptied my c drive onto it.

Sorry. I sound pretty whiny here. But I'm just so frustrated.

Defragging My Hard Drive

MrZero — Fri, 02 Sep 2005 08:43:56 -0800

Help me defrag my hard drive! I haven't defragmented it in a long time, and now it just won't work. It's been years since I defragged (oops, my bad), and now the Windows defragment tool is having a problem. It runs for a while, then it hits some sort of snag around the 10% mark and restarts at the beginning of the drive. I'm running an older machine with Windows 98 SE, and the hard drive is partitioned in two. The 10%-restart problem happens on both the "drives."

What can I do? I've read that most defrag programs simply provide a different interface for the Windows defrag program, which is what's giving me the problem already. Is there a program out there that actually runs its own defrag operation? Free would be great, I'm a poor student.

Is my Windows Disk Defragmenter broken, or is it me?

punishinglemur — Sun, 26 Dec 2004 16:24:01 -0800

I ran the Windows Disk Defragmenter overnight on my hard drive, and it didn't really work. Fragmentation is still rampant, and clicking Analyze tells me that I should defragment the drive. Hmm, I thought I just did. Is there anything I can do, or does the Defrag tool just suck?

I degragged my HD and now I'm getting the error message 'rundll32 is not responding' when I shut down.

davebush — Tue, 27 Apr 2004 10:04:16 -0800

A couple months back, I defragged my HD. Since then, I can't shut down (I'm using Windows 2000 Pro) without getting "rundll32 is not responding." Is there an easy answer?