How do I defrag harddrive?

I e-mailed you several months ago with a pretty complete explanation of my problem. Briefly, I installed a second hard-drive of 40 Gigs, as my master, and I am now having problems trying to defrag my hard drive. The tech for Western Digital (my new hard drive) said that that is pretty common for a large hard drive, and that I would probably have to get a patch from Microsoft to correct it. I talked with a tech at Microsoft. He could not seem to help me, and had no idea what type of patch I needed to accomplish this. I cannot seem to even complete a disk scan on the hard drive. I have tried it prior to defragging, but it just keeps starting over. I have tried to remove other programs which may be cutting in, trying to start, but still seem to be having the same problem, even in Safe Mode. Could you please advise me what to do about the defragging, and what type of patch I may require in order to accomplish it? My computer has really slowed down, and locks up sometime when I am using it. I feel it would work better if I could get it defragged. Thank you, and I'm hoping to hear from you this time...........Doris Heisler

This question was answered on October 1, 2001. Much of the information contained herein may have changed since posting.

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I am not familiar with the patch you are referring to Possibly you could talk to Western Digital again to see if they have additional information You may want to try the following:

Running Defrag and Scandisk you need to be sure you have all programs closed, because these programs will need to access the Hard Drive Disk and will halt or usually cause the process to restart You will also want to disable your screen saver too When you use Scandisk be sure you select "thorough" as the type of test and to check "automatically fix errors" If Scandisk can't finish its job either exit Windows and try using the DOS version of Scandisk To do this click Start/Shutdown/Restart in MS-DOS mode When you get to the DOS prompt C:\type scandisk Besure that the drive you want to scan is selected as the prompt, to do this just type (drive:\type scandisk)

Good luck!

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Posted by Jeffrey of Chandler-Gilbert Community College on October 1, 2001

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