boot-time defragging
Yesterday I got a copy of Diskeeper to properly defrag my hard drives, which I haven’t done in several years. Possibly 7 years. The program works great and I’ve run it on my laptop and office computer several times now, and the drive looks better each time.
On my office computer, though, the page file was spread into tiny pieces all over the hard drive. The program recommended that I do a boot-time defrag, which reboots the computers and starts up a DOS-looking application that takes care of the page file and a lot of other boot-up things. The problem is, I started it at 5pm yesterday and it’s STILL GOING.
Right now it’s at STAGE 3. I don’t know how many stages there are and there’s no kind of status indicator on the screen. I know it’s running because I can hear the hard drive making noise. I left it running all night, thinking it would be done by morning. Has anyone ever done this? How long did it take you?
I had similar problem with Diskeeper so looked and found great tool in PerfectDisk (raxco.com). It does a complete job in one pass and gives plenty of information so you won’t be left in the dark. Recommend you give it a try.
Boot-Time Defragmentation can take a long time, especially on very large disk volumes that are severely fragmented. Therefore, before running it, you should:
Make sure you have sufficient contiguous free space. Delete unneeded files and perform one or more manual defragmentation runs to defragment the volume as much as possible.
Keep in mind that for maximum efficiency, the Boot-Time Defragmentation operation concentrates only on files that cannot be defragmented online. It is not intended to defragment all the files on your disk.
Boot-Time Defragmentation relies on having a contiguous free space into which to move the directories and/or paging file on your volume. Therefore, it is beneficial to run Diskeeper in either the Automatic or Manual Defragmentation mode before running Boot-Time Defragmentation.
It is usually not necessary to run Boot-Time Defragmentation repeatedly on a volume.
After running Boot-Time Defragmentation, use Automatic Defragmentation to keep the volume defragmented.
What I have found is that Diskeeper has a problem getting enough contiguous free space. It’s a pain to have to continually go through and delete files. That’s just my experience, for me PerfectDisk does a much better job of consolidating free space – Diskeeper doesn’t do it.
Well, there’s a way to configure Diskeeper to instead of just defragmenting the hdd, it’ll actually arrange it all into one large contiguous space. To do so, when setting the schedule, go to defrag options (I don’t have the program on this computer so I can’t tell if I have it right), and set the defrag option to the third one – when it runs, it’ll take a lot longer but it’ll be all contiguous and pretty.
iAn