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Who's defragging my drive?


Augeas

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I have a folder in My Docs called Downloads, created in 2009, in which I keep applications I have downloaded. On 18th Feb this year I downloaded Ashampoo Burning Studio 2010. I have not installed this, I still use 2009. I possibly downloaded the exe to My Docs then cut and pasted it to Downloads.

 

On 24 April I ran a Win defragger analyse. I kept the report. The most fragged file was:

 

195 fragments, 36 MB, \Documents and Settings\Me\My Documents\Downloads\ashampoo_burning_studio_2010_advanced_9.24_8115.exe

 

Oh yes, I have never defragged my one and only partition, or anything else for that matter.

 

Yesterday I ran another Win defragger analyse. Burning Studio 2010 did not feature. I ran Recuva with show undeleted files and looked at BS 2010. It was in one contiguous chunk, with a last accessed date of 18th Feb.

 

So what natural or supernatural force is defragging my drive? I have to say that \WINDOWS\ServicePackFiles\i386, at 100 fragments, still remains in that state. My immediate thoughts were that prefetch had defragged BS 2010, but why wait over two months (Feb to April) to do it? There is no mention of BS 2010 in prefetch now.

 

Some clues are that I might have run a virus check at some point against this exe, but the last access time seems to go against this.

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I have the Boot optimiser set (by default) but this is not a boot file, and it wasn't defragged between download (Feb) and defrag analyse (April). My pc had certainly been idle in that time. I'm on XP by the way.

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On 24 April I ran a Win defragger analyse. I kept the report. The most fragged file was:

195 fragments, 36 MB, \Documents and Settings\Me\My Documents\Downloads\ashampoo_burning_studio_2010_advanced_9.24_8115.exe

 

Yesterday I ran another Win defragger analyse. Burning Studio 2010 did not feature. I ran Recuva with show undeleted files and looked at BS 2010. It was in one contiguous chunk, with a last accessed date of 18th Feb.

two possible benefactors to consider that might have operated in the last two months :-

 

1. Perhaps you ran BS 2009 and it chose to do a kindness to its potential replacement;

2. One of the benefits of allowing Microsoft Updates to protect you by running MRT and who knows what else ! !

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I have a folder in My Docs called Downloads

I don't know about the "celestial" defrag going on however Mozilla Firefox will also automatically create that folder all on its own. I'm thinking it may use it when updating when I found out it was the culprit on my system for recreating that folder location.

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Augeas:

 

The Windows OS runs a "silent" defrag that cannot be turned off without a registry edit (see my post here for more info). I only discovered this because I have Norton Internet Security 2011, and if I look in the Norton Tasks I can see that the Windows Disk Defragger dfrgntfs.exe occasionally runs during system idle. This defrag cannot be turned off with the Windows Task Scheduler. I'm not 100% certain if this applies to Win 7, but Windows Vista and XP both have this silent defrag.

 

I originally thought this was a boot-time defrag that only defragged Windows OS files, but I've watched it run for several minutes during system idles and it appears to defrag third-party software in addition to Windows files. I have Piriform's Defraggler on my system, and my list of fragmented files can drop from 300+ to 5 or 6 after one of these "silent" system idle defrags with dfrgntfs.exe, so it must be similar to a Quick Defrag in Defraggler.

--

Windows Vista Home Premium 32-bit SP2 * NIS 2011 * CCleaner 3.08.1475 * Defraggler 2.05.315

HP Pavilion dv6835ca, Intel Core2Duo CPU T5550 @ 1.83 GHz, 3.0 GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 8400 GS

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The Windows OS runs a "silent" defrag that cannot be turned off without a registry edit

Not needed on Windows 7 Ultimate.

 

I consulted

http://www.blackviper.com/2010/12/17/black-vipers-windows-7-service-pack-1-service-configurations/

http://www.blackviper.com/wiki/Disk_Defragmenter

 

I disabled Windows auto defrag by :-

Changing "Disk Defragmenter" services from "Automatic Delayed Start" to "MANUAL"

and under Task Scheduler I DISABLED ScheduledDefrag

 

Perhaps those changes altered the registry, but I never looked at or touched that,

 

I will immediately know if there is a silent defrag because that causes 30% of the data to be re-written to new sectors,

and the daily incremental Macrium Backup jumps from ~200 MB to ~2000 MB as a result - that I see.

 

I only do a defrag, manual, in advance of making a FULL image backup.

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If it's on a Windows XP system using Microsoft's Tweak UI can turn off that "auto-defrag", just disable it in the General section "Optimize hard disk when idle" tick box, that will make 3rd party defrag tools like Defraggler, etc., happy since they won't have to undo what that "auto-defrag" does.

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Just a follow-up to my last post. I happened to catch one of these "silent" defrags with Windows Disk Defragmenter (dfrgntfs.exe) while my system was idle, so I'm attaching the screen shot from Norton Internet Security 2011. I also attached a screen shot of my Windows Disk Defragmenter which shows that I do not have WDD set to run on a schedule. When I checked my Task Scheduler, my last manual defrag with WDD was run months ago on 01-Mar-2011 and my last scheduled defrag task (disabled more than 2 years ago) was run 28-Aug-2008, so this can't be an interrupted WDD defrag trying to run to completion.

 

I checked the Services in Windows Vista, and unlike Win 7 Ultimate, I can't see any service named "Disk Defragmenter" or "Windows Disk Defragmenter" where I can change the start-up. And I might be mistaken, but I recall reading that turning off the auto-defrag in Win XP with Tweak-UI only disables the WDD task in the Task Scheduler and doesn't prevent these "silent" defrags.

--

Windows Vista Home Premium 32-bit SP2 * NIS 2011 * CCleaner 3.08.1475 * Defraggler 2.05.315

HP Pavilion dv6835ca, Intel Core2Duo CPU T5550 @ 1.83 GHz, 3.0 GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 8400 GS

post-28709-0-23020100-1309645298_thumb.jpg

post-28709-0-44283700-1309645351_thumb.jpg

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I happened to catch one of these "silent" defrags with Windows Disk Defragmenter (dfrgntfs.exe) while my system was idle, so I'm attaching the screen shot from Norton Internet Security 2011.

I can attest that Windows does indeed ignore it's own defrag disabled command while you use some other programs.

 

My auto defrag is currently disabled and it doesn't defrag during idle. However, back when I used Returnil 2011 it would defrag during idle, and the only way I could prevent that was to run AutoClicker http://www.garyshood.com/rsclient/, set for every 60 secs.

 

(Unfortunately, I just now checked that site and it's currently down, so my work around won't help at the moment.)

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If Windows breaks the rules on me I will get satisfaction by fixing it good.

I would change dfrgntfs.exe to dfrgntfs.eEe.

If I overkill I can always put the name back, or plug in the Boot CD and restore yesterday's image.

 

I see no dfrgntfs.exe on Windows 7 Ultimate.

I see dfrgui.exe

I see a Start Menu shortcut .lnk with a target %windir%\system32\dfrgui.exe

I see no %windir%\system32\dfrgui.exe

I find two versions of dfrgui.exe in winsxs, the 64 bit and the 32 bit versions.

Life was so much simpler with 32 bit XP.

 

O.K. I will fix both 64 bit and the possible fall-back 32 bit dfrgui.exe.

 

For 20 years I had to use Windows computers that were managed by I.T.

Now Windows is mine to control it is overdue some payback ! ! !

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I updated to Defraggler v. 2.06 today (08-Jul-2011) and noticed that the setup wizard now gives users the option to "Replace Windows Disk Defragmenter" (see attached .jpg). This option can also be changed in the Advanced options settings of Defraggler after installation. The FileHippo website has a complete change log for v. 2.06 here.

 

Does anyone know exactly what this "Replace Windows Disk Defragmenter" option does, and whether it is designed to prevent these "silent" defrags by WDD during system idles?

_____________

 

Edit: I just found a new thread in the Defraggler forum here about this option, but no one has posted a definitive answer yet.

--

Windows Vista Home Premium 32-bit SP2 * NIS 2011 * CCleaner 3.08.1475 * Defraggler 2.06.328

HP Pavilion dv6835ca, Intel Core2Duo CPU T5550 @ 1.83 GHz, 3.0 GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 8400 GS

post-28709-0-99760900-1310152762_thumb.jpg

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_____________

 

Edit: I just found a new thread in the Defraggler forum here about this option, but no one has posted a definitive answer yet.

--

 

 

Someone has posted an answer, yours truly. But definitive it isn't.

 

For that, I think some dev input is probably required.

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Kinda OT but I tried Defraggler about 6 months ago when I first got my Win7 PC (mind you it's a terabyte drive so that means about 90% of my drive is empty). Windows defragmenter always showed that the drive was safely 3% defragmented. "If over 10% defragmented, run Windows Defragmenter".

When I ran Defraggler it showed thousands of defragmented files, so I ran it. Afterwards I noticed strange things cropping up. Like folder icons being generic instead of pic-sensitive like before. That's all I can remember for now though other weird things started popping up as well.

I deleted Defraggler and began running the generic Windows defragmenter again since then and one by one things started righting themselves out over a short period of time.

 

Maybe Defraggler isn't the best thing for 64-bit systems. On XP I'm sure it's a killer app.

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  • 2 weeks later...

There's a post in the Tech Support Guy forum here that reports that idle time defrags by dfrgntfs.exe can be stopped in Windows XP by disabling the Windows Indexing Service. I haven't tried it yet on my Vista machine so I don't know if this just decreases the number of idle time defrags or actually stops them altogether. Thanks to coyote2, who posted this link in the Norton support forum here in a similar discussion about unexpected defrags.

 

Has anyone figured out what the new Replace Windows Disk Defragmenter option does in Defraggler? Piriform still hasn't updated their Defraggler documenation to include this information.

--

Windows Vista Home Premium 32-bit SP2 * NIS 2011 * CCleaner 3.08.1475 * Defraggler 2.06.328

HP Pavilion dv6835ca, Intel Core2Duo CPU T5550 @ 1.83 GHz, 3.0 GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 8400 GS

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There's a post in the Tech Support Guy forum here that reports that idle time defrags by dfrgntfs.exe can be stopped in Windows XP by disabling the Windows Indexing Service.

In Services it's named Indexing Service. I've always had it disabled along with disabling the optimization in TweakUI and Windows Defrag never runs.

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Hi Andavari:

 

It doesn't look like my Vista OS has an Indexing Service that can be disabled in the Windows Services, and I can't see a way to disable indexing from the Indexing Options in my Control Panel, but according to an article here in My Digital Life, the best way to stop all indexing services in Vista is to disable the Windows Search service.

 

Even if this solution works for Vista users, I'd hate to have to sacrifice my search performance just to reduce the frequency of these "silent" idle time defrags.

-------

Windows Vista Home Premium 32-bit SP2 * NIS 2011 * CCleaner 3.08.1475 * Defraggler 2.06.328

HP Pavilion dv6835ca, Intel Core2Duo CPU T5550 @ 1.83 GHz, 3.0 GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 8400 GS

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I've had no use for Windows Search since installing the speedy Everything. Big improvement. :)

I fully agree.

The only problem is it use MFT AND ignores these types of partitions :-

FAT32;

Virtual NTFS e.g. files in virtual K:\ when a Macrium mounts as K:\ a partition image backup file of C:\

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