- When The Defrag Lags

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When The Defrag Lags

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Question: I have a Packard Bell system that I bought about four months ago. It has Windows 98 installed on in. I try to clean up my hard drive every six weeks or so and have never had any problem doing so.

A couple of days ago I tried to defragment my hard drive. It started out fine, but after about 15 minutes my computer froze. I tried it again last night and the same thing happened. Why is it doing this, and what can I do about it?

--Liann, Vancouver, Wash.

Liann,

It's good to hear about people who faithfully defragment their hard drive on a regular basis. First, a definition: When files are changed on your computer's hard drive, gaps occur between files. Large files get broken into smaller pieces and space is lost between. After a while, your hard drive looks like digital Swiss Cheese. The defragmentation process consolidates files and removes the gaps between them. This frees up lost space and makes your hard drive run faster.

In order to organize the hard drive, you need a lot of free space. Your computer temporarily moves files into unused space before removing the gaps and reintegrating the fragments. If your hard drive is almost entirely full, then your computer will be unable to complete the defragmentation process. Make sure you have several megabytes free before you attempt to defrag.

Because your computer is relatively new, I suspect that you have plenty of free space and the problem lies elsewhere. In order to reorganize your hard drive, the defragmentation process needs to be able to access all the files on your computer. It's very possible that some other program is interfering with the defrag software.

The culprits are usually virus scanners and other programs that are constantly in your computer's memory. You can see their telltale icons lurking down in the Windows Task Bar in the lower right corner of your screen.

At any given moment, the defrag program is probably trying to move a file that the virus scanner is examining. This file-locking conflict causes the defrag process to halt. Shutdown and disable all programs, large and small, before you begin defragging your hard drive.

Maybe It's Your Hard Drive

If another program isn't causing the conflict, than it's possible that your hard drive has errors. Flaws in the magnetic media can be detected and avoided with Scandisk which lives right next to "Defrag" in the "Tools" part of your hard drive's properties. Run a thorough scan of your hard drive and see if any errors are detected. If so, these areas need to be isolated and removed from the defrag process.

More severe is the possibility of a bad hard drive or hard-drive controller card. If this is the case, your hard drive's performance is going to continue to degrade as you use it more often. If you've shut down all conflicting programs, successfully scanned the disk for errors, and you still can't get defrag to work properly, then you could have bad hardware. I strongly recommend that you back up your files and bring the computer in for service.

Postscript: The Amazing, Time-Travelling Computer

Finally, I have read of the following weird case involving the system clock. Sometimes computers lose track of the date, even if it's not Midnight of the Year 2000. We had a machine here at Digital Daily Headquarters that would periodically catapult itself forward to the year 2098 for reasons unknown. When the system date is wildly out of sync with the dates on the majority of the files, the defrag process can become very confused. Make sure your system clock is on the correct date.

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