Well this takes forever

[SeaCat]

I decided my computer needed some work. It's been running slow. I decided to run Speed Disk on it. (Defrag.)

Holy shit but this takes a while when you have a 30 Gig Hard Drive. I think the next time I do this I'll wait until it's time to head for bed and let it run over night.

Cat

 

[JagFarlane]

I decided my computer needed some work. It's been running slow. I decided to run Speed Disk on it. (Defrag.)

Holy shit but this takes a while when you have a 30 Gig Hard Drive. I think the next time I do this I'll wait until it's time to head for bed and let it run over night.

Cat

Depends on how heavily loaded down the hard drive is.

If its still running slow, look at how much of the harddrive you're using up. Windows requires a portion of the hard drive to be free in order to use it as Virtual Memory. This is the most common reason for computers running uber slow, a full HD. If its full and you don't wish to delete anything, you can usually get a decent external HD that connects in a couple minutes via USB to put programs on and alleviate the issue.

 

[jomar]

Yeah, it can take awhile if disk space is marginal and ram is minimal. Don't forget the spyware and adware stuff.

 

[Weird Harold]

I decided my computer needed some work. It's been running slow. I decided to run Speed Disk on it. (Defrag.)

Holy shit but this takes a while when you have a 30 Gig Hard Drive. I think the next time I do this I'll wait until it's time to head for bed and let it run over night.

Cat

Norton's Speeddisk Defragmenter?

It takes forever if you only run it when the computer gets slow. It only takes my computer about 30-35 minutes for 36GB in seven partitions -- if you do at least once a month. If you run it once a week, it takes even less time -- 15 minutes or so.

(the smallest of the seven partitions takes the longest because it's the most used and has the least free space.)

 

[JackLuis]

Try it with a 360 GB drive!

I screwed up my boot sector on my only hard drive and had to replace the drive, because ... well just because. The smallest drive I found at Fry's was 360 GB and it gives me a lot of space but Wow if I had to defrag it, I'd have to take a vacation.

 

[R. Richard]

Let me expand on what WH has said.

The first time you defrag a drive, it takes a while. There's a lot to defrag and a lot of files need to be moved. Once you have defragged the drive initially, there's a lot less movement needed. Thus, the successive defrags take less time. After a while, a lot less time. I always try to defrag my drive around the first days of a new month. My defrags now take only a fraction of the first defrag run.

 

[Weird Harold]

Try it with a 360 GB drive!

I screwed up my boot sector on my only hard drive and had to replace the drive, because ... well just because. The smallest drive I found at Fry's was 360 GB and it gives me a lot of space but Wow if I had to defrag it, I'd have to take a vacation.

That's one reason that I have seven partitions for only 36GB.

If I'm short of time, I don't have to wait for all of my Audio files on Drive H or Graphics files on Drive G, or MS Office documents amd misc. files on Drives D, E and F to be moved to make room for an expanded log file in the system folder at the bottom of the pile. I can just run speeddisk on the three partitions that are used every day C: (boot disk and everything that Windows won't put someplace else,) E: (the Virtual memory swap file,) and I: (the program files partition.) the other four are data partitions that really only need defragging about once a year because they don't get fragmented by just adding files.

To my way of thinking running a single 360GB drive as a single partition is asking for a disaster -- you lose the file allocation data and you lose everything all at once. At least with partitions, or even better separate drives, you safeguard at least part of your data from a disk crash and make recovery of data after a crash bad enough to take out the partition table much simpler (because the data partitions don't fragment as badly as the partition(s) with the operating system and program files on it.)

 

[john-the-author]

I'm suffering badly from the indirect effects of a lightning storm Tuesday. I did a shutdown prematurely and my main computer took damage somehow: the hard disk may have been spiked. We can't get it up again. Problem is, the drive that got clobbered also has email, book files, and writing on it. Most of it is backed up fairly well, but it's not completely current: the last few weeks arent backed up for example.

It's off at the computer repairman's while I'm using this POS laptop and sweating.

 

[Weird Harold]

I'm suffering badly from the indirect effects of a lightning storm Tuesday. I did a shutdown prematurely and my main computer took damage somehow: the hard disk may have been spiked. ...

I don't think the drive got spiked, I think the premature shutdown scrambled the file structure. That can make a drive react like it isn't formatted and generally takes a data recovery service to handle.

Lightening has been rather brutal the last couple of days, though -- two boys struck while playing catch in the park with one dead, a lady in nebraska(?) killed by lightening, a boy in california(?) that survived without serious injury, and a AW airlines 737 struck by lightening tha thad to turn back to Oakland IAP. God knows how many phones, TVs and computers are getting repaired or replaced.

If the files are really important -- important enough to hire a data recovery service -- call your repair shop and tell them NOT to format the drive unless they can recover the data first. If you need that data, just replace the drive to get the system back up and then deal with recovering the data as a separate issue. A typical repair shop won't be able to recover the data unless you luck out and the drive can be slaved to a new drive and read as a non-bootable data drive.