hard drive won't defrag

[Dale_N]

I have tried O&O defrag and the vista disk defragmenter. My hard drive won't defrag below 30%, is this normal?

 

[Nez]

Dale.Try turning off some programs first.If that does not work,try Safe Mode.

Re boot your PC,then press F8 on your keyboard,before your system loads up.

 

[mansrm81]

You can also try this.

Disk Defrag - Reclaim the Speed Of Your Disks

 

[OldBloke]

All defraggers need to have enough free space on the drive, to be able to shuffle the files around. You could use Windows own disk cleaner or Ccleaner to make space by deleting stuff in the TEMP folder and temporary internet files (the browser's disk cache) etc.

It's best to run the defragmenter program soon after a reboot, before running any other programs.

There are some system files in use which cannot be moved while Windows is running. Some defragmenter programs include an option to do a "boot time defrag" which schedules a defrag for the next boot. It does the job before Windows is loaded, so it can defrag the system files. Or you could run SysInternals PageDefrag (which is specifically for difficult files such as the page file) before running your normal defragger in Windows.
PageDefrag

 

[SIW2]

Hi Oldbloke,

I looked at page defrag before on sysinternals site, but never used it since it doesn't list Vista - just says this :

PageDefrag works on Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Server 2003.

Does it work on x64 Vista ? - if so, I'l give it a go.

Thanks

SIW2

 

[OldBloke]

I looked at page defrag before on sysinternals site, but never used it since it doesn't list Vista - just says this :

PageDefrag works on Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Server 2003.

Does it work on x64 Vista ? - if so, I'l give it a go.

Ooops, I didn't check it's compatability with Vista 64. Sorry about that. Last time I used it was in XP. I'm not sure whether you can safely use it in Vista 64.

One alternative is to install the free trial of PerfectDisk which has a boot time defrag option.

I notice Dale_N has the O&O defragger. I'm not familiar with it but I imagine that too has an option to do a boot time defrag of system files.

Whichever one you use of all those programs, all defraggers need enough free space on the target partition, to make it easier to rearrange the files.