Check Files Problem

When trying to defragment my Seabright 500GB drive...Windows 7 never
completes the process and the drive remains 1% fragmented. So I 'check
files' and scan for bad sectors.The message seems to stay at 'Processing 517
files.' The memory usage keeps going up to the point where I have to close
the program. (I have 8GB installed). Something is not right!

Any Ideas?

Thanks,

Oreally

On Wed, 31 Aug 2011 08:52:41 -0700, "OREALLY" <>
wrote:

>When trying to defragment my Seabright 500GB drive...Windows 7 never
>completes the process and the drive remains 1% fragmented. So I 'check
>files' and scan for bad sectors.The message seems to stay at 'Processing 517
>files.' The memory usage keeps going up to the point where I have to close
>the program. (I have 8GB installed). Something is not right!
>
>Any Ideas?

Only 8GB? I don't think I would waste much time on it. Move the files
off the drive and reformat it.

--

Char Jackson

OREALLY wrote:
> When trying to defragment my Seabright 500GB drive...Windows 7 never
> completes the process and the drive remains 1% fragmented. So I 'check
> files' and scan for bad sectors.The message seems to stay at 'Processing
> 517 files.' The memory usage keeps going up to the point where I have to
> close the program. (I have 8GB installed). Something is not right!
>
> Any Ideas?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Oreally

Doing a search, I can find plenty of evidence this is "by design"
and it's stupid. They try to use as much memory as possible, to make
stage 4 checking faster or something. Some people report
chkdsk even causes pageouts, so it isn't even stopping when
the memory is nominally full.

One user suggested to start something like a Virtual Machine,
a program with a known large memory allocation, *then* start
chkdsk. chkdsk will then take note of the amount of memory
available on the system. Then, exit the Virtual Machine
or other kind of memory hogging program. chkdsk will then
stay within it's originally computed memory footprint,
avoiding running the machine into a paging situation.
(I find it hard to believe the bad chkdsk code actually
runs that way, but experiment and see if it is true.)

I'm on a 32 bit system right now, so the Testlimit program
here works. If you have a 64 bit system, you may be able to use
either of these programs. testlimit64 is a 64 bit program and
only runs on a 64 bit OS.

http://live.sysinternals.com/Tools/WindowsInternals/
Friday, November 12, 2010 10:53 AM 76152 Testlimit.exe
Monday, November 15, 2010 2:18 PM 79224 testlimit64.exe

Go to Start, and type in "cmd.exe". Basically, start a Command Prompt,
navigate to the directory holding the downloaded copy of Testlimit,
then try something like this.

testlimit -d 1900

What that does, is leak and touch 1900MB of memory. I'm on a 4GB
machine, with a 32 bit OS, and a single process can't go higher
than 1900MB. (I think I noticed Photoshop suffering in a similar
way, and can't go higher than roughly that value.) As long as
testlimit is running, with that leaked allocation, chkdsk will be
fooled into thinking it can't have all the memory. Now, start
your chkdsk run as you normally would. Now, go back to the
MSDOS command prompt window and press <control>-c to stop
the testlimit program (control-c will cause the program
to be killed). It will release the 1900 MB of memory back
to the OS. Now, the theory is, chkdsk can be a pig, but it
will stop when it gets within 1900MB of the end of memory.

If you use testlimit64, the command would look like this

testlimit64 -d 4096

That would allocate 4GB of memory, which you could then "give back"
once chkdsk is running. The amount of memory you allocate, could be
set to say, half your installed memory.

The reason I'm suggesting this, is to see whether this "workaround"
actually works or not. I don't see a reason why it should, but you
have the incentive to give it a try.

You can see more fun with "testlimit" program here, which is where
I first read about it.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/markrussi...7/3155406.aspx

The last time I experimented with "testlimit", I wasn't able to
convince myself that *any* option caused it to actually
commit (and not just reserve) memory. The -d option seems to be
doing the right thing now. If I look in Task Manager, and look
at the list of processes, it shows Mem Usage and VM Size fields,
are roughly the same size, which means the program has committed
the memory. So it seems to be working well enough, to be used to
test the proposed "chkdsk workaround".

Paul

OREALLY wrote:

> When trying to defragment my Seabright 500GB drive...Windows 7 never
> completes the process and the drive remains 1% fragmented. So I 'check
> files' and scan for bad sectors.The message seems to stay at 'Processing 517
> files.' The memory usage keeps going up to the point where I have to close
> the program. (I have 8GB installed). Something is not right!
>
> Any Ideas?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Oreally

Journalling files (if you're using NTFS) can get scattered across the
hard disk. Defragmenters won't move them. Journalling files are always
open. That's why you can see a huge chunk of free space to accomodate a
huge file that should fit but it'll get fragmented because of
journalling files occupying that same "free" space. Reimaging the
partition (not a sector-by-sector image but a logical image using the
file table) moves all the journalling files together.

Unless you configured Windows to use a fixed size for its pagefile, it
will get fragmented. The max size is reserved space but where is not
fixed nor is it guaranteed to be available later. You have to move the
min size up to the max size to fix the pagefile at that size. I usually
set the pagefile to a fixed size, delete it, and reboot to have Windows
recreate it but at a fixed size. SysInternals' PageDefrag can defrag
the pagefile but that won't help if it isn't a fixed size as it will get
fragmented later.

Vista and 7 added more unmovable files. The System Volume series of
files are for System Restore, Shadow Copy service, or Windows backup.
XP let those files get defragmented but not in Vista/7. See
http://arrowquick.com/blog/2011/01/2...special-files/
for more info regarding Windows 7. Deleting the journal file could have
it immediately recreated if any application was using it. Deleting the
journal file impacts the FRS (file replication service) and file
Indexing service because these services would have to perform a complete
rescan of the volume. See:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/l...42(WS.10).aspx.

Why are you so concerned over 1% fragmentation?

On 31/08/2011 16:52, OREALLY wrote:
> When trying to defragment my Seabright 500GB drive...Windows 7 never
> completes the process and the drive remains 1% fragmented. So I 'check
> files' and scan for bad sectors.The message seems to stay at 'Processing 517
> files.' The memory usage keeps going up to the point where I have to close
> the program. (I have 8GB installed). Something is not right!
>
> Any Ideas?
>
> Thanks,
>

A number of free defraggers here:
http://lists.thedatalist.com/pages/Defragging_Tools.htm

Might be worth trying one or two to see if you get the same result. If
so, it would appear to be the disk which is the problem. If not, it
would appear to be the Win7 utility.

--

Jeff

On 31/08/2011 11:52 AM, OREALLY wrote:
> When trying to defragment my Seabright 500GB drive...Windows 7 never
> completes the process and the drive remains 1% fragmented. So I 'check
> files' and scan for bad sectors.The message seems to stay at 'Processing
> 517 files.' The memory usage keeps going up to the point where I have to
> close the program. (I have 8GB installed). Something is not right!
>
> Any Ideas?

You could try analysing the filesystems while outside of Windows, such
as booting into an external OS, through a boot CD. They have one
designed specifically to diagnose Windows problems called BootMed.

http://www.bootmed.com/

Yousuf Khan

On Wed, 31 Aug 2011 18:12:51 -0400, Yousuf Khan
<> wrote:

>On 31/08/2011 11:52 AM, OREALLY wrote:
>> When trying to defragment my Seabright 500GB drive...Windows 7 never
>> completes the process and the drive remains 1% fragmented. So I 'check
>> files' and scan for bad sectors.The message seems to stay at 'Processing
>> 517 files.' The memory usage keeps going up to the point where I have to
>> close the program. (I have 8GB installed). Something is not right!
>>
>> Any Ideas?
>
>You could try analysing the filesystems while outside of Windows, such
>as booting into an external OS, through a boot CD. They have one
>designed specifically to diagnose Windows problems called BootMed.
>
>http://www.bootmed.com/


The installer is only a stub installer. When you run it, it
connects out, downloading much. Why would they do it like
that?

--
croy

On Thu, 01 Sep 2011 18:47:03 -0700, croy <>
wrote:

>On Wed, 31 Aug 2011 18:12:51 -0400, Yousuf Khan
><> wrote:
>
>>You could try analysing the filesystems while outside of Windows, such
>>as booting into an external OS, through a boot CD. They have one
>>designed specifically to diagnose Windows problems called BootMed.
>>
>>http://www.bootmed.com/
>
>
>The installer is only a stub installer. When you run it, it
>connects out, downloading much. Why would they do it like
>that?

Roboform (for example) does it like that to ensure that you always get
the latest executable. Maybe this is similar?

--

Char Jackson

On 01/09/2011 9:47 PM, croy wrote:
> On Wed, 31 Aug 2011 18:12:51 -0400, Yousuf Khan
> <> wrote:
>> http://www.bootmed.com/
>
>
> The installer is only a stub installer. When you run it, it
> connects out, downloading much. Why would they do it like
> that?

You're not really supposed to install it, it's supposed to run from CD,
so you don't overwrite anything on the hard disk. It's intended to fix
Windows problems while not using Windows itself.

Yousuf Khan

croy wrote:
> On Wed, 31 Aug 2011 18:12:51 -0400, Yousuf Khan
> <> wrote:
>
>> On 31/08/2011 11:52 AM, OREALLY wrote:
>>> When trying to defragment my Seabright 500GB drive...Windows 7 never
>>> completes the process and the drive remains 1% fragmented. So I 'check
>>> files' and scan for bad sectors.The message seems to stay at 'Processing
>>> 517 files.' The memory usage keeps going up to the point where I have to
>>> close the program. (I have 8GB installed). Something is not right!
>>>
>>> Any Ideas?
>> You could try analysing the filesystems while outside of Windows, such
>> as booting into an external OS, through a boot CD. They have one
>> designed specifically to diagnose Windows problems called BootMed.
>>
>> http://www.bootmed.com/
>
>
> The installer is only a stub installer. When you run it, it
> connects out, downloading much. Why would they do it like
> that?
>

They offer the download without tricks, here.

http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/fil...scription.html

Thw download running right now on my computer, is

http://downloads.pcworld.com/pub/new...k/bootmed1.zip

and with my slow internet connection, it'll take a while.

When unzipped, that should be an ISO9660 file, used by a CD burning
program to prepare a bootable CD.

Paul