Free PC Support

[toveyj]

Hi

I have an XP PC which has been running really slowly. I had the same problem a few months ago and ended up using the restore disk from the vendor to set it back to factory condition. It was great for a while but th eproblems are now coming back. I have a few free tools to tackle the common problems like registry errors and have F-Secure software which is supposed to sort out spyware and viruses.

My query is, as part of the sequence of obvious things to do i have been trying to defragment my 120GB hard drive. It has been running continuosly for 2 days and has so far got to 70%..! My disk is only 40% full. I did run a disk check first to see if there were any errors on the disk but it came up clean. I have also shut everything else off so only the defrag is running. I had exactly this experience last time before giving up and "resetting" the machine. i thought maybe the drive was faulty, but after resetting the machine was flying so I don't think it can be a hardware fault.

Any thoughts on why it would take so long to defrag a disk which isn't that big and is more than half empty?

Thanks

[SoftStag]

It sounds to me like there is a small portion of your hard drive that is physically faulty. Under normal operation you may not notice this, however if Disk Defragmenter is using that part of the drive and can't read/write, it is causing it to wait for the action to complete. I would run the chkdsk with the following parameters:
chkdsk c: /r

This will try to locate bad sectors and recover readable information.
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