Defragmentation hangs after reaching 1% defrag.

Question

I am trying to help my daughter with the above problem,  her computer (runs in XP)  will not complete defragmentation, but I have run out of ideas,  (I am the one-eyed man - king in the land of the blind).     She has downloaded, and run,  Ad-Aware and Spybot and also run  'Disk Cleanup' and 'chkdsk' but found no problems.   She has also tried Defrag. in Safe Mode but it will not complete.    I have tried searching the Microsoft Knowledge base but this has not heard of the hanging problem in XP.     I have found suggestions in other Dell Forums but not in XP.       Please, has anybody got any specific advice for this problem in XP?   T.Hyde

Denny Denham · Answer

thyde,

If Safe Mode did not work, perhaps a Clean Boot will. See this.

If that fails, perhaps defrag.exe is corrupted. In that case go to Start|Run, enter sfc /scannow (space after sfc) and click OK. That will replace any missing/damaged Windows files.

boj · Answer

file system: -ntfs or fat32?

thyde · Answer

To Denny:  Thanks for your reply.   My son has had a look at my daughter's computer and discovered that it has not been updated for ages.    The missing updates are now being downloaded and the various housekeeping programs will be tried again.     I have copied the various KB articles about 'Clean Boot' but have not tried it.    Also I looked up the references to 'sfc /scannow'   but the Microsoft KB articles refer to Windows 2000 and the offending computer has XP installed.    There is something else that occurs to me about repairing parts of the operating system - I presume that the source of the correct files is located in a .cab file which was stored on the computer when it was delivered and, therefore, it will not contain any updates.    If this is the case, then I also presume that these updates will need to be downloaded and reinstalled.     To boj: Thank you for your reply, but at the moment I cannot answer your question until the computer is next opened.   T.Hyde

Justequestya · Answer

OK - After 7yrs of win95, I have a new Dell w/XP-H, & I'm not sure if the below applies(I'll find out *fast* when I need to do a defrag on the new PC), but here's what my routine was in win95: (I should note that when doing the below, I didn't even have to run in Safe Mode)

1-turn off any screen saver

2-disable any A/V program that's running.

3-disable any other *running* spyware/adware program

4-*make sure* you re-enable item #'s 2 & 3 after defrag is done

5-reset the screensaver, if you wish

Note: I don't know what else you have running, but if you still have a prblm., check to see if you have anything else running that is writing to the HDD, & temp. disable or close that too.

HTH

thyde · Answer

To Justequestya: Thank you for your reply. On my XP computer I have never needed to disable AV or any other programs when I have used Defrag. and the program has run fairly rapidly without any problems. I ran Defrag. as recently as last Sunday and that took about 25 minutes to tidy up the C: drive which is about 50% full. As a precaution, I alter the time settings for hibernation and power economy just in case Defrag. takes a long time. The problems I wrote about at the start of this thread occur on my daughter's XP computer and I have not been able to do any work on that one since I sent the original message to this Forum.

T.Hyde

Justequestya · Answer

Thyde - And thank you for the feedback. I may just go ahead & try defrag on the new XP w/o doing my prev. win95 routine & see how it behaves. I'm not a newbie by any means, but XP certainly seems to have dealt w/certain shortcomings in win-9x. I'll just have to get over any 'culture shock' in using XP, just as I did going all the way back to DOS 3.2(or so)! Good luck w/your work-in-progress.

Windows General

Defragmentation hangs after reaching 1% defrag.

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