Analyzing for Defrag is getting stuck at 70%

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YOUR KONG
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Analyzing for Defrag is getting stuck at 70%

Post by YOUR KONG » Wed Dec 14, 2005 1:17 pm

So my pushed-to-the-limit Dell has been acting a little screwy lately (now that I'm SO CLOSE to finishing my album, of course). I dropped some huge files onto the desktop until I could sort them, and then things got screwy. Certain tasks would take FOREVER, like opening 1 file in Acid, or , um, shutting down. I had "Windows is shutting down" for like 3 hrs last night. (lo and behold, windows did eventually shut down).

So I'm cleaning some junk off and trying to defrag, but whenever it "analyzes" for defrag, it gets stuck at 70%.

Why? What does that mean? I currently have only 8 gigs free on my 20 gig C: drive. (Most audio stuff is on the F, but not all).

lsn110
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Post by lsn110 » Wed Dec 14, 2005 1:33 pm

First thing you should do if you haven't already.

BACKUP YOUR WORK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Next question, do you have virus protection running on the box. If you don't, spring the $30 and buy some. Along the same lines, make sure you don't have spyware hogging all of your resources.

http://www.lavasoft.com/ make a free ad/spyware cleaner. You'd be surprised what junk can accumulate if you're not careful.

You can also do a CTRL-ALT-DEL and open the Task Manager. From here, you can see what's consuming what resources. You probably won't know what all of the processes do, but you can sort by memory used or CPU usage and see who the hog is.

8GB free should be plenty. Now if you told me 8MB free, it'd be a different story.

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Phiz
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Post by Phiz » Wed Dec 14, 2005 4:10 pm

Defragmenting goes much faster when the drive is less than half full. Also, if you did some cleaning up (deleting files) before doing the defragmentation, be sure to empty the trash can before starting to defragment. Otherwise the contents of the trash can will be defragmented too and can't be used as free space during the process.

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Post by YOUR KONG » Wed Dec 14, 2005 5:26 pm

Ok, thanks all - this has been the dedicated music computer for a few months now, so I think it's clean in that respect.

I tested defrag on my dedicated audio drive (F:) and it worked fine.

So, I did some googling and eventually found the XP equivalent of scandisk: "Check disk for errors" or whatever.

So I tried to run it on C:, without any of the auto-fixing options, and got a message that says," Windows was unable to complete the disk check."

Now I'm trying it with the autofix (I've backed up thoroughly).

Yeesh!

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Post by kayagum » Wed Dec 14, 2005 5:36 pm

You answered your own question in the first 7 words of your question.

But how is it pushed to the limit?

You're always at risk if you're above 50% capacity of your boot drive. You're double at risk because you only have 8GB free space. I'm guessing you don't have enough space for temp files.

I think you have 2 options:

Get yourself a real drive. You should be able to get a 100GB drive for $100. If you can't afford $100, you probably shouldn't be in the audio business. Oh- and Maxtor and Seagate both have software to clone your old drive to your new drive. They work great!

If you can't afford $100, you can try some freeware that will clean up your drive. Tyr CrapCleaner at http://ccleaner.com/

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Post by YOUR KONG » Thu Dec 15, 2005 6:17 pm

I ran the "Check disk" utility with automatic error-checking on. It restarted and found 3 bad index(?) entries. Fixed them, scanned some more and I were good to go.

I did a superspeedy defrag and now everything is gravy. Mmm, computer gravy...

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