Disk Defragmentation

[mattboi]

When I ran disk defragmentation for about 2-3 hours and then canceled it, I noticed I lost about 6 gb of hd space(from 52.7 to 46.3)

I've looked around on google but I I've only found one other person that had a similar problem but it was not resolved...

I've been running disk defragmentation again for about half an hour so far and I've lost about 1gb of space and I don't know why that's happening.

Am I supposed to let disk defragmenter finish before it restores my lost hd space or something?

 

[Steele84]

I didn't lost any hardrive space, but I ran Disk Defragment over night and got a black screen freeze up when I woke up this morning. SP1

 

[Elvandil]

It's a good idea to let it finish. Though that big of a change in disk space seems unusual, I'm not sure I've ever known anyone to monitor space during the process. But with files being moved around and clusters being incompletely filled during the process, I'd suspect that finishing the process might resolve the space problem and that the usage data may not be too accurate during the process.

But be sure to run chkdsk on the drive at boot time to be sure there are no errors that are being amplified by defragging (Start > Run: chkdsk /f or chkdsk /r).

 

[mattboi]

thanks for the reply

i just noticed that my disk space went from 33.2 while defragging back to 35.1 while the comcast tech guy was here to help out with my slow connections while downloading via p2p

edit: back up to 36.2

 

[Elvandil]

You could experiment with other defraggers if you want to see more of what is happening. Some people do. It won't hurt to try them out, but make a decision and use just one because they use differing strategies of file placement and determination of fragmentation levels and can work against one another. If you decide to use one other than the Vista defragger, be sure to remove Vista's from the scheduled tasks.

Free defraggers:

Defraggler
Auslogics Disk Defrag
DefragNT
WinContig
Ultra Defragmenter
Defrag GUI (GUI for native defrag.exe.)
DIRMS 1.2.20 Defragger (command-line)
JKDefragGUI
Disk Idle Optimizer
Power Defragmenter
Diskeeper Lite
O&O Defrag 2000 Freeware
IObit Smart Defrag (Can be scheduled.)
DefragMentor Lite (Boot-time and command-line.)


(PageDefrag is good to use with all the above in XP. It does a boot-time defrag of all the major locked files.)