Problem with defraggler.

[Mychael]

Gave the girlfriends HP laptop a "grease and oil change". More memory and new larger HDD (ide, from 60gig to 160 gig) and cloned across the O/S.
All is working well and faster except for defraggler, a program that worked fine before on her system.
Now when it gets to about 80% progress it tells me it cannot complete due to lack of free disk space, even whilst itself showing the HDD is only about 20% full.

Any ideas? Windows XP home.

 

[catilley1092]

There may be a couple of possibilities. First, in some instances, XP can only "see" 127 (or 137) GB of the disc. This problem is more noticeable with Win 2K, but can occur with XP, too.

What you can do to find out exactly what's on the drive is download & install Glary Utilities. There is a really good drive analyzer within the program. Skip the "one click maintenance" deal, the registry cleaner & defraggler. There's modules on the left, it may be in "Files & Folders". You can see every file and how much space it's taking on the disc. If nothing else, you can see what's there.

Another thing, instead of a clone, if you have a backup with a program like Macrium Reflect, you can simply restore it to the drive, after formatting with a program such as Partition Wizard. That way, when you restore, you can expand the backup to fit the drive. This works best for me. If the old drive is still intact, you can do it.

Hope this helps. With the drive size, you may want to avoid a clean install, if that's possible.

Cat

 

[Mychael]

Thanks Cat, have not had a chance for a serious fiddle with it yet.. Defraggler works fine on my other XP machine with 500g HDD but they are SATA, maybe the older ide has an issue with larger size. I'll put minitool partition wizard home on the laptop and have a look.. The drive was cloned with cloning software though not by me.

 

[Mychael]

Well have not tried all the fixes yet but as an experiment used the defrag feature within the C drive > properties>tools>defrag. Not one known as a rule to work exceptionaly well but it completed without issue.
Tried defraggler again and it stopped again at 80% with message about not enough disk space. I'll try some of the other fixes over the weekend.

 

[yodap]

Hmm... don't know if it will help but do you have the latest version? v1.21.209

 

[Mychael]

Hmm... don't know if it will help but do you have the latest version? v1.21.209

Haven't checked but I'd think so as I ran an update for latest version.

Isn't there another defrag program around people use? Think it's called "smart defrag". If I can find that I might give that a try. Otherwise all working fine and a lot faster with the new drive and more memory..

Using the standard defrag option it's down to 3% now anyway but still curious as to why Defraggler does not want to play anymore.

 

[beamish]

A link for Ultradefrag.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ultradefrag/

 

[Mychael]

A link for Ultradefrag.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ultradefrag/

It's not one I am familier with, do you have personal expereince useing it? Any issues with it?

 

[TorrentG]

O&O Defrag ...that's the one you want.

Turn off background monitoring and zones (although both are excellent and can be used)...then manual scan a "space" type of defrag every so often.

 

[Mychael]

Thanks Torrent. Now you have chipped in do have any thoughts as to why defraggler used to work on this machine but now doesn't?

 

[TorrentG]

You're welcome. I haven't the slightest clue. It probably has something to do with the fact it was a clone and Defraggler doesn't like it for whatever possible reason.

 

[Mychael]

Well just run (and still running) O&O defrag (free version) on laptop and desktop.
Few interesting things so far,, wayyyyyyy slower to analyze and defrag then defraggler is but got the desktop down to 0% fragmentation and I've never seen that before. Still waiting to see if it can complete on the laptop.
Also it has showed on the laptop "reserved for MFT" which other defrag programs have not shown and also interestingly there is no "reserved for MFT" partition on the desktop HDD.

 

[TorrentG]

It's slower only because it's the first time you ran it. Of course it's going to take longer. It's defragging using it's own algorithm which has never been used on your drive before.

Subsequent defrags will take much less time.

If you continue to use it, you'll want to disable the Disk Defragmenter service in Windows and stop the scheduled tasks from running any auto defrags. Allowing it to continue as normal would just defrag how that algorithm wants it...which would make the O&O runs mean nothing (and undo it's work.)

 

[Mychael]

Yeah, got that. I never run auto defrags anyway.. Usually a manual job once a fortnight (give or take) really depends how much adding/deleting I've been doing.

Update. It just finished on the laptop without errors. Did not bring it down to 0% as it did with the desktop. Still at 3%.

As a cross reference I let defraggler analyze but not defragment both computers. It also confirmed the desktop now to be 0% which defraggler could never achieve and the laptop at 3%. Which defraggler could previously achieve before it stopped working on that machine.

So as a conclusion O&O works equally as well or better then what I was useing and gives more information about the drive.

Update 2: Ran O&O and 2nd time on the laptop just to see what happened and as you said the analyze was a lot faster but still could not achieve 0% defrag.. Not the 3% is an issue I just mention it as information.

 

[catilley1092]

As long as the computer is running fine, that's what counts. On all of my drives (except one, 7 Ultimate), I can get all the way down to zero. Not just zero percent, but zero files fragmented. However, with Ultimate (my evaluation OS), I can only get it down to 22%. But the Windows defrag tool reports 0%.

That's kind of weird, 22% is quite a bit, but Windows doesn't show it. I've never had a problem with Defraggler since I began using it. In fact today, I've been reinstalling everything on my notebook, and the only file that's fragmented out of three Windows OS's is a single 12KB file (2 fragments).

But the OS is running fine. I'm going to check that O&O program.

Cat

 

[catilley1092]

The O&O program didn't pan out for me, but I found a really fast one. Auslogics Disc Defrag. After analyzing, my OEM install was perfect, which I knew it was already. The other partition (Ultimate) reported 3% fragmentation. I selected to defrag it, it took no time at all to defrag it, then I compared it with the one in Windows, it reported 0%.

However, Defraggler now reports 23%. I'm going to keep an eye on things, they both agree with my OEM partition (not a single file fragmented), but are way apart in the other partition. As long as the OS is running good, I'll uninstall Defraggler from this partition.

Auslogics Disk Defrag can be found at:

http://www.auslogics.com/en/software/disk-defrag/download/

Enjoy!

Cat

 

[Mychael]

Weird huh. As torrent explained each de-fragger must use a different algorithm to do it's thing but both O&O and Defraggler both agreed with each other about the % on the drives.
I used to have Auslogics defrag, got rid of it, cant remember why now.

 

[Nibiru2012]

These defrag programs are becoming like anti-virus programs. Everyone has an opinion.

For me there has been only one to use and that is Raxco's PerfectDisk defrag program.

It has consistently been rated the best by several reviews over the years and it's the one I plan on sticking with.

The others don't measure up in my humble opinion. PerfectDisk FTW!

 

[Mychael]

These defrag programs are becoming like anti-virus programs. Everyone has an opinion.
!

Yep, only one way to solve this. We all sell our PC's, all buy Mac's, then just post photo's of how they co-ordinate with our decor. lololol

 

[beamish]

Update information:

UltraDefrag is a powerful disk defragmentation tool for Windows. It is the first open source defragmenter with full support of system locked files defragmentation.
Actually all files including registry hives and paging file can be processed by UltraDefrag during the Windows boot process.
Also one of the primary goals of the UltraDefrag design is doing the job as fast and reliable as possible.
UltraDefrag is fully compatible with Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, Windows 7 and all of the 64-bit editions of Windows.

I have not used the "boot process". Used the basic drive defrag.
Also use "Free Registry Defrag V 3.0", does not make changes in the registry, it compacts, filling the empty space.

Run these tools plus others prior to running Acronis True Image for the "C" drive.