Problems Defragging large drive

[Arcnite]

I have a western digital 180GB drive with an 8MB cache. I split it into 2 equal partitions. Origonaly I tried to do it in 3 but there were problems. Anyways, I use my second partition for downloading and temporary storage. Because of that alot of files are moved in and out and the drive becomes heavily fragmented if I don't keep it defragged often. Unfortunately I haven't defragged it in about a month or so and now every time I try to defrag it my system locks up. I've tried using Diskeeper and O&O Defragger, both lock up. Any ideas?

System Specs relative to this-
Epox 8K7A+
1GB PC 2100 DDR
ATA133 Controller card (hooked up to the drive I'm talking about)
Another WD-80GB drive hooked into the Mobo.

 

[4Ryan6]

Try VoptXP, you can try it for 30 days free, if it can't Defrag, it will ask your permission to temporarily take control of the machine, it will do a shutdown and controlled restart, with minimal programs operating and will complete the defrag. Always make sure you uninstall your other defrag programs you've added, they can conflict with each other, except the Windows defrag it doesn't have any problems with that. Always shut down your Anti-Virus program, if its running in Auto-Protect mode, you can find VoptXP at <A HREF="http://www.goldenbow.com" target="_new">http://www.goldenbow.com</A>It also has a Batch Defrag mode which can do all your drives at one time. Hope this helps.

<b><font color=purple>Details, Details, Its all in the Details, If you need help, Don't leave out the Details.</font color=purple></b>

 

[Teq]

I can't speak for any Defrag other than O&O and the built in XP defrag, but both these programs need at least enough contiuous free space to write out temp files while moving and shuffling. Also, you cannot defragment an NTFS volume with allocation units bigger than 4k. (why? I don't know)

If you are using Kazaa or similar peer to peer downloaders, it's likely your drive looks like swiss cheese, with lots and lots of little tiny spaces but no big free areas... this is because of the way these programs handle downloads in little chunks, reconnecting them when the file is complete and massively fragmenting your drives.

You can minimize this effect by going into your registry at:
<font color=green>hkey_local_machine\system\currentcontrolset\control\filesystem</font color=green>

and adding or setting the DWORD value:

<font color=red>ContigFileAllocSize</font color=red> == X

where X == 4 allocation units in Kilobytes == 16 for most NTFS, up to 128 on fat32)

If you are on NTFS you can also add:

<font color=red>NTFSDisableLastAccessUpdate</font color=red> == 1 (DWORD)

To pick up a nice little bump in access speeds.


If you are on NTFS you might be able to get out of not being able to defrag by:

Right click the drive icon in my computer, click properties, then advanced and check the "Compress this drive to save space" and then telling it to apply the attribute to all folders and files. It will take a while but it will compress the drive creating some blank space in the proces.

This should let you defrag the drive.

Later, you can uncompress it if you like by unchecking the box and then defragging again. But compressed drives can give you up to double the storage space, with only a small hit in performance.



--->It ain't better if it don't work<---