Advice sought: incomplete defragmentation...?

[cazboy]

Hello, I just downloaded Defraggler version 1.06.118 yesterday. I'm running Vista Home Professional 32-bit. When I run Defraggler on my "C" drive and let it run, it will eventually finish and report "Defragmentation Complete". But the graphic readout (the colored squares) show over HALF of my drive represented by RED squares! So why does Defraggler report that it's done with the defragmentation process, and yet show the job only half done?

 

Thanks in advance............

[jack-72]

hello

 

i have quiet a similar question: i run windows xp mce sp3 32bit. i let defraggler run through once, it gives me some 2 fragmented files with about 2.3 gb. when i do the check once more straight after the first defragmentation there are suddenly 11 fragmented files with a total of 10.6 gb. how can this be? the very first run gave me about 600 fragmented files with a total of 8.6 gb. i didn't do anything between this 3 scans/defragmentations except emptying my dustbin with CCleaner...

 

could someone give me an explanation or maybe help?

 

thanks

jack

 

i did one analysis, one defragmentation and a second analysis again, the results are seen in the attachements.

[Recoil]

I have the same problem. I have had a look, and the red is "System Volume Information".

 

Also, i have been defragging for over 4 hours - its only done 59%! It only used to take 30mins at the most.

 

R

[cazboy]

Well, OK then. I've already uninstalled my copy of Defraggler. My original question was simple enough, but I've noticed two things. #1, nobody (either other forum members or someone from Piriform development team) has answered my question. And #2, two other folks have chimed in with the same problem!

 

This shows me that maybe there is a resolution to this particular problem and maybe there isn't. Either way, Defraggler is not ready for release. I don't know about the rest of you guys, but I'm sticking with the OEM defragmentation tool or possibly one such as Perfect Disk or Diskeeper.

 

On the other hand, CCleaner is a wonderful tool and very effective. Let's hope that the Piriform folks keep working on Defraggler. It's a good idea that doesn't have all the problems ironed out.

 

Thanks anyway................................

[Guest MrRon]

If you analyse the drive again, do you still have lots of red blocks? Also how many files (roughly) are listed in the file list.

MrRon

[jack-72]

hallo

 

somehow a solution to increase the defragmenting succes is to defragment the whole drive first (to have much less fragmented files) and then to open the file list, check the files one after another and click the "defrag checked" button for each. this gave me an additional succes and reduced the fragmented files to 1, the total of fragments to 2. a lot less then after simply defragmenting the whole drive! Maybe this could be a help for others as well :-)

 

jack

[cosmotopper]

If you analyse the drive again, do you still have lots of red blocks? Also how many files (roughly) are listed in the file list.

MrRon

 

When I originally installed Defraggler, I was very pleased (so much so, I prematurely sent a donation). It appeared to be doing a great job. Unfortunately, having processed a few more devices, I'm simply mystified as to the inconsistent and seemingly ill-considered protocols. To highlight this, I'll use one test case which leaves no room for doubt: I have a 160GB USB drive formatted NTFS. There is 66GB in use, slightly more than one third of the total. Probably 20 of the files are 1GB or more. Given this scenario, it should be possible to defrag every single file. I could defrag the drive simply by copying all 66GB onto another drive, erasing it, and then copying the files back one by one (caveat, some copy programs might needlessly interfere in that process, leaving some fragments). However, after running a basic pass, I ended up with about 50 fragmented files and a little over 1000 fragments.

 

So, I set the options to force files 250MB or larger to the end of the disk. That seemed to reduce the number of fragments a little bit, but at the end, the graphic display showed what appeared to be the end of the disk with a solid block of red clusters(?). The number of fragmented files had been reduced by about 10. There was plenty of free space (white?) on the display, so I'm wondering, why didn't it defrag the remaining files?

 

Next, I reduced the limit on the 'move to end of disk' to 25MB. Since I had already moved the 250MB+ files to the end of the disk, I would have assumed that Defraggler would leave them where they were, and simply add new ones where it left off packing the first group. Instead, it appeared to refragment the first set of files in order to move the smaller files into their place. This sounds absurd to me.

 

UPDATE: After some investigation, I find that the NTFS file system design is (predictably, since it's a product of Microsoft) seriously flawed. Clearly, using a large USB external device (or any large drive for that matter) creates major conflicts if one were to attempt to store (lets say for example): one branch containing lots of files, many small documents, images etc., along with some number of large multimedia files, DVD ISOs, or ZIP archives. In the above test case, I find that my 'MFT' has 18 fragments, which 'cannot be defragmented' (according to the Microsoft documentation). This is absurd, hence explaining the absurd results referenced above. Apologies to Piriform for the inuendo that they might be responsible.

 

FYI, I plan to navigate around this problem by re-formatting all my NTFS external media with at least one virtual drive (either ISODisk or TrueCrypt at the moment) which should have the effect of reserving a large contiguous 'super-cluster' which can be used either for big multimedia/zip files, or lots of little files, while not overloading the brilliantly conceived Master File Table (which can't be resized, moved or defragmented).

 

(I can only say thank God for the European Union's legal team for going after this criminal organization (stock symbol:MSFT) which has fed off the Personal Computer industry almost since it's inception.)