Hard Drive constantly fragmenting

[Andrew]

I've noticed that I defragment my hard drive every day or two, and it finds lots of fragments.

I defragged my computer yesterday, and I've used my computer for web browsing today for 3 hours and it now shows 367 fragmented files and 1937 excess fragments.

I'm not downloading any large files or filesharing, so I have no idea why it is getting so fragmented. 60% of my HD on this partition is free (other partition is ubuntu linux, and HP winXP backup).

[Megashrap]

I haven't checked mine for defragging in forever. But it says 16% fragmented, I guess it's time to run that tonight. Just one of those things I hardly ever do, but should. I don't think though that 367 files are anything much to worry about. What percentage of your HDD was fragged? total I mean, just curious.

[Dragoon Knight]

I stopped defragmenting my hard drive when XP came out.  They changed the way it was displayed.  I loved the Windows 95 / 98 visualisation of the Disk Defragmentation tool.  I could sit there and watch it for hours.

I hope they bring it back in Vista.  Of course, the chances of this happening are incredibly slim, but one can hope. :(

[Andrew]

If I don't defragment for a week, it gets 1% (total files) fragmented or something like that.

One thing I never understood is people who don't defragment. I have a friend who has a laptop and didn't defragment it for several years with only 20% free space. It ran horribly slow not being taken care of properly (probably kills battery as well).

I liked win98 defrag too. Was fun watching ;).

But seriously you havn't defragged your computer with winxp?

Even a computer literate friend of mine doesn't defrag, not sure why, he has multiple large (~100gb) hard drives full of stuff. Said winxp doesn't need to be defragged or something.

But as far as I know linux is the only thing that doesn't need to be defragged, and I presume WinFS that was supposed to come with Vista (but got scrapped) was supposed to be better.

[Megashrap]

The one thing I did do was when I made my clean fresh install image backup, I created the image just after a fresh sys. defrag. So, my image restore which would take around 10 minutes or so is also newly defragged. I can't even remember the last time I actually had to run one using XP. I also remember watching it run using 98 watching the blocks form nice n tidy. But I also remember with 98 that at times I could check it and it would say 70% fragmentation if I never checked it often.

[Andrew]

oh cool. So you somehow made a copy of your harddrive (with just basic windows installed), and burnt to DVD then just wipe HD clean and paste the contents back and it works like new?

I might have to do that with my new computer. I only got cd-r so I cant back up anything bigger than 700 mb.

[Megashrap]

I have Powerquest Drive Image. What it does and can do is make an image and places it as a partition at the end of your HDD. Mine is around 8 gigs,give or take. Kinda like the restore program with XP, but with a bad ass virus/adware it can damage your restore files. But cannot with the Drive Image backup. So if anything goes wacky with virus's etc. I will just restore the image I made. Only take me about 10 or 15 minutes to do.

[gryphon]

I've noticed that I defragment my hard drive every day or two, and it finds lots of fragments.

I defragged my computer yesterday, and I've used my computer for web browsing today for 3 hours and it now shows 367 fragmented files and 1937 excess fragments.

Think that's hardly worth mentioning. considering you have about 50+ open files in Windows at any given time. 367 fragmented files seems nothing after 3 hours.

oh cool. So you somehow made a copy of your harddrive (with just basic windows installed), and burnt to DVD then just wipe HD clean and paste the contents back and it works like new?

It's not a copy but an "image". Copying will most possibly not work.

I hope they bring it back in Vista.  Of course, the chances of this happening are incredibly slim, but one can hope. :(

They havn't. It's more like the scandisk option which also doesn't display anything anymore. Defrag is by default automated though in Vista so it will run in the background ones a week. :)

[Megashrap]

Defrag is by default automated though in Vista so it will run in the background ones a week. :)

That will be a nice little touch. Defrag to me is sort of like a cars air-filter, you know it has to be done at sometime, but it tends to be the one thing I put off doing untill it really needs it.  :)

Acronis is what I use now, not Powerquest Drive Image.

I believe Symantec took over Powerquest some time ago.

[erjin999]

Scar, my program files is not on my C drive anymore, cos I image it, and I want the image to be as small as possible. I have images going back to when I installed XP last (new mobo and cpu, about a year and a half) and I regularly make new backups. At 1.5Gb average size for my working C: drive, the images are about 500Megs. I use XPLite to make it small, so image is not inconvenient at all!

I can image my HD in about 3 mins when I am about to test out some new software. If I dont like it and want to really get rid of it, image back, delete corresponding E:program filesFOLDERNAME folder and voila.

Very good way of doing it, I find.

Recently found out that I couldnt do something with my install, so figured something buggered up, I went back and image or two, but with the problem still there, I had to go back about 8 months before it was corrected (cant remmeber what it was, but was something I hardly ever used before but became important to me).

Took about an hour to get it all done.

[gryphon]

Personally I found virtual machines a better way to test software then ghosting my computer back. :)

[Megashrap]

Scar, my program files is not on my C drive anymore, cos I image it, and I want the image to be as small as possible. I have images going back to when I installed XP last (new mobo and cpu, about a year and a half) and I regularly make new backups. At 1.5Gb average size for my working C: drive, the images are about 500Megs. I use XPLite to make it small, so image is not inconvenient at all!

What I do is install OS, XP Home, get all my Windows updates, Anti-virus updates, any games I'm gonna need with patches updated, etc.(BF2 and Emp usually) ;). Then image as it's own little HDD backup at the end of C drive. Roughly between 2 and 8 gigs...as I only use two 40 gig HDD's. What I like about the program is even in worse case scenario, the 2 floppys will boot into the program from dos and re-image just fine. But thats what I consider a regular clean install backup. for me anyway. So what ever goes astray will be fine in a few minutes wether or not I burn to DVDR, or the backup on the HDD. either way has always worked just fine. I can't think of an easier way to restore problem free in a few minutes.  ;)

[erjin999]

Personally I found virtual machines a better way to test software then ghosting my computer back. :)

But they are resource hogs anyhow. And its not like I regularly test new programs. But if that works for you..