Defrag won't work

[Wakeboarder141]

I am trying to defrag a drive because when I try to use Norton Ghost it says I cannot ghost from the drive because it needs defragged. The problem is while defragging it gets to around 11% normally and then says "drive contents have changed, restarting" I have nothing running and am not touching anything on the computer when it happens. Any ideas? Thanks.

Defrag in Safe Mode.

[John Prophet]

what shows up when you do "cntrl alt delete"?

screen saver set to go off?

hooked to a lan?

(once I had that as an issue, it would defrag till I pulled the cat5 out..weird..only did it once)

[Jeordiewhite]

Well I recall windowsdefragger (it's a stripped down version of diskkeeper) /disk keeper, both need to be ran several times if you have heavy fragmentation. Atleast that's what the tip of the day told me when running disk keeper.
Just keep running it if it needs to be.

[Gettinbye]

First off, what version of windows are you running?
Second, when you get the error "drive contents have changed, restarting", you've got something else writing to the disk in the background while the defragmentation process is running. As ER mentioned, running in safe mode should theoretically solve this. If not, run msconfig>startup and kill any non-essential startup programs, then boot to safe mode and defrag.
*EDIT* I should mention that there are faster and much more efficient defrag programs than the one bundled with windows (Disk Keeper,ect...)

[John Prophet]

If its w98..run, dont walk..to the nearest WinME machine and take defrag off of it and use it on the 98 machine....I think its just in the windows folder. (dont tell Bill Gates though..he gets mad if you improve windows)

WinME defrag is like 10 times as fast.

[MegalosSkylaki]

Ok, go to Control Panel > INTERNET OPTIONS >CONNECTIONS>

See what is chosen for "Want Browser to" or such.

If it is something like "Dial Upt Whenever There is No Connection",
that may be the problem.

The OS is trying to Dial-Up every few minutes or so, killing your Defrag.

Instead, select something that says, "Do nothing" or such.

You may want to go back after a Defrag to re-Check "Go to Default Browser when ..." so that if you lose your connection, it will restart Dialup.

AWELLDEFRAGMENTEDDOOOOOOG

[Dj-Icer]

Sometimes defrag woudnt also work in Safe mode. What I do, id reinstall OS or load down Win98 backup files from ur hardisk. If it is available...

BTW I like the old defrag motion than the XP's.

[Wakeboarder141]

The OS is Win98. It is on a cable connection and is set to never dial a connection. I did Cntrl+Alt+Del and ended every task except explorer.exe and sysytray and it was still doing that. It isn't the screen saver becaue it only takes it about 60 seconds to get to the point where it restarts. After looking at the legend while it is defragging it looks like once it gets to the rarranging part of the process it is getting farther along each time. Then it restarts, but when it gets back to rearranging it keeps going where it had left off. I didn't watch it long enough to see if it would ever get past 11%. I will see how it did through the night and try disk keeper if that doesn't work. Let me know if you think of anything else. Thanks.

[Bill in SD, CA]

Here's a link for Win Me Defrag.

Also you may want to run Spybot and Adaware as you may have some "spyware" running silently in the background.

And as stated above, run in safe mode or if running normal kill everything but explorer and systray and turn off the screensaver.

Bill