(solved) Windows Me: Defragmenting

[david needs]

My hard drive is 8.4 gig it takes forever to defrag,is there
any way to speed it up.Please help.

 

[DoyceJ]

Do your scandisk, defrag and all in safemode. If 98, restart and begin tapping F8 after the first screen. When you get the menu page, choose safemode>enter. It will look different so dont worry. When finished just restart and it will go back to windows normal.

 

[tosim33]

Download the defrag utility from WINME. It is fairly fast. If you can't find it, search at google, or let me know.

 

[spaceman_333]

Hi David,

The WinME defragger is here:

http://www.lurkhere.com/~nicefiles/index.html


I use it..


spaceman

 

[DoyceJ]

If you're running Win95 or Win98, try http://www.wilders.org/HTMLobj-732/newdefrag.zip

This is originally the Windows ME defrag, and it runs a lot faster. Rename your own C:\Windows Defrag.exe to Defrag.old, and put this one in.

 

[DoyceJ]

I also found this article.

I was just reading your column, and I noticed the question from the guy (Bigdg, I think it was) about why Windows gives out of memory errors when he tries to defrag. Your answers were good, but I would bet $50 that I know why it is happening...

Up until about a month ago, I did technical support for Windows 98. As drives got bigger and bigger, we discovered something interesting - Windows will always give not enough memory errors when you have one huge partition (i.e. bigger than 13GB or so, ...) and you defrag it. The reason is the way Windows breaks down the partition into clusters. The FAT32 file system was not really designed to handle the number of clusters you get when you have a partition that big, so no matter how much RAM you have, it will always crap out on you...

The solution I would recommend would be to repartition into smaller partitions, preferably under 8.1GB. You lose the advantage of FAT32 when you have a partition bigger than this, because you go from 4k clusters (good - the reason you want FAT32 in the first place) to 8k clusters (the same as FAT16, and with a partition that damn big, you're going to see a performance hit because of it... This should take care of the out of memory errors that Bigdg and others in his predicament are having...

So my guess is that its pushing the limit right now.

 

[david needs]

Thanks all your help worked.

 

[DoyceJ]

Glad to hear it.