Thread: Defrag fragged my drive

Did a defrag on my 80GB NTFS volume and immediately after....the whole thing died a horrible death. Over 5000 unreadable file segments...prob more but I hit the big X to shut the damn thing down because it made me sick.

What would cause this given that my drive seems ok now? A reformat fixed it. Why did I have to lose 65GB of precious precious precious (they were really precious) files?

Anyone else have probs with defrag? Never seen this happen before.

Weird too because I defragged C and it was ok. But D: was not readable and was causing major lockups. Windows shell does not respond to drive/file-system failures very well.

I haven't done a defrag in years. I think it puts a lot of stress on the drive, for very little, if any, noticeable benefit.

Well it stressed my drive to the max. Totally corrupted the file system. Thanks, Bill.

Originally Posted by ober

http://consumer.diskeeper.com/diskee...=1&Aeid=&Apid=

Buy it, use it, love it.

I have another solution, and it's free! It's called Linux:
http://iso.linuxquestions.org/

Thanks, will look into it. Flaming piece of poo is right. Whoever wrote it for MS didn't get all of the bugs out of it. That's the only thing that could have brought my drive down. The last thing I did was build my editor source and e-mail it to one of the team members. Then I defragged, went to bed, got up, defragged, and then shut the system off. When I came home from work last night the system was slower than crap but my systray applets were still loading off D: Drive. Then out of nowhere it all went south and read failures left and right - missing MSVC shortuct, no DX 9.0 SDK and incorrect free space reporting. What a mess.

But it didn't crash because I deleted the partition (quite hesitantly I might add) after I realized all was lost and the patient was dying. Then I formatted and so far everything works fine. Had to be defrag.

Originally Posted by Bubba

Flaming piece of poo is right. Whoever wrote it for MS didn't get all of the bugs out of it.

I totally agree. One question though? Why use Diskkeeper by Executive Software? They're the ones that made the MS defrag tool. Check the about box for it sometime.

This reminds me of when I got up and found a blue screen on my machine and after restarting my machine wouldn't boot complaining of corrupted/missing SYSTEM file. So I had to format and everything was lost. My system has been running fine ever since and I never did find out what caused it.

Do you have S.M.A.R.T. monitoring enabled, Bubba? Just to make sure that the drive's telemetry isn't on the way out. Depends on its age though, it's practically unheard of for a reasonably new drive to develop a fault.

Can't see how Defrag could be buggy, myself. It's job isn't really that complicated, unless of course M$ hasn't properly tested modern NTFS partitions with it.

Regular backups to CD or DVD might also be a good idea. Both the media and the drives have gotten cheap lately.