You might want to run spinrite on the drive if you have/can find a copy of
it.
On Nov 15, 2010 4:33 AM, "Dale" <rdalek1...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Stroller wrote:
>> On 15/11/2010, at 3:56am, Dale wrote:
>>
>>> ...
>>> I have a niece that brought me her puter. It's a HP with windoze XP on
it. I want to defrag the hard drive but the one that comes with windoze
won't work. Is there a free defrag tool that is safe on windoze?
>>>
>> I would be more concerned why defrag itself (Start> Run `dfrg.msc`) isn't
working. If it's refusing because there's filesystem corruption, then I
would advise against using anything else!
>>
>> You need to be logged in as an administrator in order to run defrag. If
you boot XP to safe mode then a user named Administrator will be shown
amongst the logon icons, and that user has no password.
>>
>> Running defrag,exe at the command-line (Start> Run `cmd`; `defrag,exe
/?`) might give an explanation. Running `chkdsk /?`, choosing the most
aggressive options and then `chkdsk c:` will cause the disk to be checked
for corruption (`fsck` equivalent) at the next reboot. Obviously you should
take a backup before doing this, as occasionally filesystem corruption will
be *really* bad.
>>
>> Ideally you will disable swap / pagefile before defragmenting and enable
it again afterwards. You can boot from a PE boot CD and run defrag from
that, but it doesn't really seem necessary.
>>
>> Also check that "compress files and folders" is disabled<
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307987>. You're best to apply it to the
whole drive (actually tick the box saying you DO want to compress files and
folders), but when the dialog box comes up saying "shall I apply that to all
sub-directories" tell it "no". Then go back to checkbox again, disable it,
then when the dialog box comes up tell it "yes". That will crunch away for
some time ensuring that compression is not being used at all. Because
Windows XP launched a decade ago, when disks were much smaller, the option
to compress files and folders is recommended in the Disk Cleanup Wizard, so
this option may be set incorrectly, and it is worth checking.
>>
>> Stroller.
>>
>>
>
> I am thinking like you on the reason it is not working. It was brought
> to me because it was not running as fast as it used to. First thing I
> noticed was that AVG hasn't been updated in about 2 YEARS. I installed
> the newest AVG and it found hundreds of infections and said it fixed
> them. I never was a big believer in "fixing" a infection. Anyway, I
> got that updated and got it to scan until nothing was found.
>
> While doing that, I noticed the drive was really doing some serious
> searching while booting and such. It is also pretty slow to boot. The
> poor drive light stays on about all the time and you can hear the heads
> going back and forth. I wanted to run defrag just to see if it would
> help. I figure if AVG hasn't been updated in that long, I doubt they
> ran defrag either, not to mention it doesn't work.
>
> I couldn't get Defraggler to work either. Different error and I even
> tried a older version that wasn't beta with the same results. I then
> found mydefrag and gave it a try. So far, it is working on it and it
> seems to be doing something at least. The window makes it look like it
> was fragmented really bad. It looks like something that would come out
> of a blender after hitting frappé.
>
> If this completes, I'm going to let them try it to see if it is any
> better. If it is still not to their liking, they will just have to get
> a windoze CD and I'll reinstall from scratch. That should help.
>
> In case you can't tell, I don't claim to know a lot about windoze.
> People in my family just like me to work on their puters. I worked on
> puters until windoze 3.1 came out. I changed careers. I got tired of
> that pretty quick. I just thought DOS was bad. lol
>
> Dale
>
> :-) :-)
>
