Defrag will not run

[Monty99]

Hello,

I have a friend who has Win98. He's trying to run defrag on his HArd Disk. It gets about 10% of the way through and then stops. He says he's run scandisk,and there's no errors on the disc. What could cause this to stop?

Regards,

Monty99

 

[cdogg]

Monty,
There are a ton of threads that have been started in the past on this. I highly suggest searching for common questions using the advanced search option above.

In short, defragmenter can become interupted if something running in the background makes a "disk write" to the hard drive. Screen savers, power management, antivirus scanners, etc. are all examples of interference. You can try to kill them before hand by hitting CTRL-ALT-DEL and ending task on everything except Explorer (don't worry about the "killing" part - rebooting will bring them back).

If your friend can't determine where the conflict lies, have him defrag in safe mode...


~cdogg

"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources."
- A. Einstein

 

[smah]

Another very common cause of this (if using MS Office) is my favorite waste of resources - Find Fast.

 

[MFCS]

Have your friend reboot the system into Safe Mode and run the Defrag then, also make sure they clean out all of the Temp and Temporary Internet files and empties the recycle bin. When it is finished reboot the system normally.