Question about Disk Defragmenter

[poertner_1274]

My roommat has very little free space on his hard drive, and hasn't defragged in a while. He wants to do it, but it says that it needs 15% free space on that drive to do it effectively. But it asks if you want to do it anyway. I told him to hit no, because I didn't know if it made a huge problem. Any thoughts are appreciated. If anything else is needed feel free to ask, as I will post back.

 

[SNGX1275]

Nothing bad will happen. I'm pretty sure that I've had that problem before and it just tells you after churning on it for a while that you don't have enough free space to defrag.

 

[poertner_1274]

Yes the message comes after it gets done Analyzing the drive

 

[Phantasm66]

you will increase the efficiency and speed of the defragmentation if you free up some more space. 25% or above is ideal.... I always try to have 25% free on each partition. i know that overall this mean that 25% of disk space is not ever used, but the machine runs better that way.

 

[boeingfixer]

Also another quick and easy thing to do on a windows 9x machine before you run scan disk or defrag is reboot the computer into safe mode. No drivers and such will load and it will not be interrupted 10 times before it is finished....good luck

 

[SuperCheetah]

I've had this message before and went ahead and defragged, but it never completed defragging the drive because of the lack of space. I'm not really sure why, but it left a small portion of the drive fragged. Guess Microsoft just didn't want me to fill my drive up movies, MP3's, etc.

Like SNGX1275 said nothing bad will happen to your drive, just don't expect it to be running in tiptop shape after one defrag. I would suggest doing it a couple of times just to be sure.

I've also heard reports of having 40% of your hard drive free to optimize defragmenting, but I believe this is a little obsessive.

 

[poertner_1274]

Thank you I will let him know. I didnt' think it made a differene, but I wanted to make sure from others first. Better safe than sorry!!!

 

[Mictlantecuhtli]

During defragmentation, files are being moved into free space & back. If there's not enough free space, some files/directories (usually large ones) remain fragmented.

 

[Phantasm66]

Originally posted by boeingfixer
Also another quick and easy thing to do on a windows 9x machine before you run scan disk or defrag is reboot the computer into safe mode. No drivers and such will load and it will not be interrupted 10 times before it is finished....good luck

that's a good tip.

If there was a defragmenter that ran in DOS, I would want that!

I remember reading a paper once that claimed that hard disk problems, including a loss of performance, can occur when free disk space on any partition drops below 20%.

I suggest freeing up some disk space.

 

[boeingfixer]

Thanks for the complement Phantasm66, after the day I had, it made me feel alot better.

Sometimes when your up to your a** in aligators, you forget all you wanted to do was drain the swamp.

 

[Didou]

Originally posted by Phantasm66


that's a good tip.

If there was a defragmenter that ran in DOS, I would want that!

I remember reading a paper once that claimed that hard disk problems, including a loss of performance, can occur when free disk space on any partition drops below 20%.

I suggest freeing up some disk space.

I've had a bad experience with a DOS defrag. Quite a while ago, I always installed DOS 6.2 & ATAPI drivers before running the Win95 install ( my BIOS couldn't boot on the CD-Rom at the time ). I knew that DOS 6.2 had a defrag tool so I thought it might be faster to boot in DOS mode & launch it rather then use the WINDOWS one.

So I did boot in DOS, launched DEFRAG & things were OK. When I rebooted, Windows refused to start. After a while of looking around I realised that Defrag changed all the names of the files & directories that were longer then 8 characters to a bunch ~1 files, etc... ( like C:\progra~1 )

Those were the days I was getting familiar with the format command too

 

[Mictlantecuhtli]

I thought Window$ tries to prevent this by renaming DOS's DEFRAG and placing DEFRAG.BAT there which says something like MS-DOS DEFRAG doesn't handle long file names!

 

[Mac_Bug]

You should use VOpt, it's fast, compact, and 30 day free. See my other thread in this forum.