Wirehead Studios

Apparently, after dozens of attempted defragmentation, my (70GB NTFS) HD still wants to remain 30+% fragmented, 50+% of which is file fragmentation. Is there something that's specifically preventing my files from becoming contiguous? Despite having 18% free space, my HD indicator looks like a frickin' rainbow barcode. It's currently undergoing a scan right now to look for any errors in the file structure, which may or may not take an eternity. Other than that, are there any other ways to increase my computer's efficiency? Page file increase, anyone?

Just in case you're not using a 'professional defrag tool', but something like windows default defragmenter, know that the latter seems to use a typically MS-approach to defragmentation. That often results in not getting a proper complete defrag going.
I use O&O defrag, which does the job fine, even on 100GB+ disks. I don't think it solves problems with pagefiles, but there are other tools for that. Special tool devteams often advertise these properties of their software, so they shouldn't be hard to find.

Odd... I haven't defragged in 6 months, and my drive has 68 GB worth of data (100 GB drive), and is only 3% total fragmented with 7% file fragmentation.  I only use the built in defrag tool for Windows too.  I'm running 2k server.  Are you running XP?  Could this be an XP-specific glitch maybe?  Maybe some spyware, or maybe even some benign background processes could be interfering with your defrag process?  I'm guessing here as to the cause, but only two possibilities exist:  either Windows is not reporting the fragmentation information correctly, or it's not defragmenting the drive correctly.  You might try defragging in SAFE mode to see if it makes a difference.  If it does, then it's a dead giveaway that some running process or service is causing the problem.

get a secondary harddrive, copy the fragmented files to said drive, defrag previous drive again, copy said files back.

fat32 gets silly about fragmentation, and it's probably your page file and system files getting hosed. Which you pretty much have to do in safemode.

That's not FAT32, Angst.

*headdesk* ugh, I need a new job.. missing details all over the place..

Funny thing to consider though, how big would those clusters for FAT32 be? :]

Here's one for you. Funny that this just happened.

I went to analyze my C: drive before defragging it, and it gave me the message:


If I just try to defragment the drive, it gives me the same message. I've never seen it before, nor have I scheduled such a thing, I haven't ever been told to do it, and I don't really have the time to let it go, either. What's going on?

It sounds like you have disk checking already scheduled to run.  Check the task schedular?

DAMMIT! My defragger just discovered that 60% of my harddrive is not only in partially-filled clusters, but they're UNMOVABLE. At least, that's what DefragNT reports.

Damn you, NTFS compression. :shout:

Well I think that settles the irresistable force vs immovable object debate.  When the two collide, Assamite explodes.  :surprise: