| User | Post |
Ailure
Posts: 9066/11162 |
I would rather say command prompt if it's Win XP, it's really not DOS... 
Ironcally it's the opposite for chkdsk. It tells more than the graphical disk checking tool. :/ |
HyperLamer
Posts: 4024/8210 |
Just the standard defrag, yes. Not the DOS one, I actually started up Explorer and ran it. (And then immediately closed Explorer.  ) DOS's didn't seem to do any better, but it doesn't have any real output so I couldn't tell if it was even doing anything.  |
Ailure
Posts: 9064/11162 |
There is, but it stops being reserved when the computer really needs that space. Heh, I know since I used to have a lack of space on my C drive... or hda1 as the linux people say. |
Prier
Posts: 5719/8392 |
Isn't there also a certain reserved space on the drive for the comp aside from the swapfile and the files currently being accessed (MFT? I'm not sure here.)?
That, and what are you using to defrag? Just the standard Windows one? |
Ailure
Posts: 9050/11162 |
I think booting in Safe mode with command prompt should yields the least "protected blocks". Not sure since well... thoose blocks that can't get moved aren't fragmented anyway so I have no need to do defrag on them. |
BMF98567
Posts: 738/1261 |
I think the unmoveable blocks include the swap file and system files that are currently in use. It could be that rebooting unloaded whatever programs were using the files, allowing them to be safely defragged.
I often wonder why different computers have vastly different numbers of those blocks, though...a clean Windows install on my new computer a while ago yielded a huge number of untouchable blocks.  |
HyperLamer
Posts: 4011/8210 |
Well it's been a while, so I figured I should probably defrag the damn thing. I booted up in Safe Mode and started defrag, took quite a while and spent most of the time stuck at 'compacting files (28%)'. Eventually I figured it might be because I was doing it on the system drive, so I stopped it and booted the other install (on a different physical drive I haven't got around to formatting yet), and continued there... It jumped right back to where I'd stopped it, and just stayed there. There was constant disk activity but nothing seemed to be happening. After about 12 hours I just stopped it; it's already got all the files put in order, there's just a lot of gaps between them. Why would it take so long though? I had literally nothing else running and it's a 7200RPM drive on its own IDE channel which is usually blazing fast.
Also, why are there always variable amounts of un-moveable files? I'd guess they're system files that have to be in a certain spot, but they're not always in the same place and the amount of them changes. In fact, before I stopped and booted the other install, it showed a few, but afterward, there weren't any... |
