HDD with EZ-drive won't defragment

[xexth]

Hi! I have a computer with a BX chipset and 2 harddrives - the old drive is a 5 gig and it defragments ok - the new drive (which had to have ez drive installed so the bios would recognize the drive) is a 20 gig drive. When I go to defragment the 20 Gig drive,in either normal mode or in safe mode, windows 98 comes up with an error message that says that there is not enough memory to defrag the drive - this is not true as there is 256 mb of memory available - and gigs of space on the hdd - does anyone have any suggestions to work around this problem. Thanks in advance for your help.
Best Wishes
Xexth

 

[micker377]

EZ Drive puts an "overlay" that re-aranges a bunch of stuff. If curious, use fdisk and look at your partitions. You will see a "non-DOS" partition, check the size. For a work around, when you boot up, you will see amessage "to boot from a floppy - press xxx". I don't remember what the keys are. This will bypass the overlay and allow you to run defrag from DOS.

 

[xexth]

This would be a nice solution if it worked - but it doesn't. When you try to run defrag.exe from a boot disk it gives the message "degrag requires windows to run".
Thanks anyway.

 

[cdogg]

The "EZ Drive" setting is a whole other issue. For now, just see if you can run defrag in safe mode. During the bootup sequence right after your BIOS POST screen disappears, start tapping F8 to get a boot menu. Select the regular "Safe Mode" option.

The advantage of Safe Mode is that very few processes are allowed to run in the background. In Normal Mode, the "out of memory" message you were getting has nothing to do with your physical RAM (so 256MB or 512MB isn't going to make a difference). The type of memory it's referring to is the USER and GDI heaps - or in plain English, a fixed amount of memory set aside to manage resources and running processes. This set amount does not depend on the size of RAM.

Run Scandisk, then Defragmenter in safe mode and reboot to normal mode. Once back up and running, do the suggestions in this FAQ to clean up your PC:

faq615-3144


And if you do a lot of internet browsing and downloading, go here to remove spyware from your PC:

www.geocities.com/cc210026/spyw...


~cdogg
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