Defragging Hard drives

[Rockrz]

I was just doing a defrag on my wife's PC (Windows XP Pro) and all the data in My Documents is about 22.0 Gigs.

After I ran defrag twice, I keep getting a message when it's over saying 18.2 Gigs of the data in My Documents cannot be defragged.

Anybody have any idea what's going on with this?
I've never seen this problem before.

 

[Nodsu]

The files in question are either in use by some program or the disk is too full. IIRC you need at least 15% of free space for Windows defrag to work properly.

The amount of that data is staggering though.. How big is the hard drive itself? What does she have in her docs that consumes 20GB?

 

[davidbugeja]

I agree. The disk needs to have some disk space empty. On a 20 GBs disk it requires about 3 GBs Free in order to complete correctly.

Also i think the Windows Defragmenter does a very bad job. I suggest you try Ultimate Defrag which is a Hardisk Defragmentation Tool and does its jobs simply excellent. However it is time consuming.

 

[Rockrz]

No, the disc is only 25% full so that shouldn't be the problem.

Plus, she had a bunch of spywarts that I had to remove so we're good now.

 

[davidbugeja]

No, the disc is only 25% full so that shouldn't be the problem.

Plus, she had a bunch of spywarts that I had to remove so we're good now.

Make sure your system is clean from any malware and spyware in order to keep it running smoothly! :grinthumb

 

[Rockrz]

Plus, she had a bunch of spywarts that I had to remove so we're good now.

I covered that in the previous post...

 

[Samstoned]

if you have recovery partition on drive defrag will not touch it