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Drive will not defrag...

M

mikecoscia

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jan 26, 2005
Messages
436
The HDD in my parents computer was acting up the other nite. Upon boot I got a disk drive error. I shut it down for the nite and it worked fine in the morning. So i ran check disk and it frooze up on me. I then tried to defrag the drive. Well the sucker is badly fragmented and defragging really did nothing at all. Is the drive on it's way out? Or should a reformat fix the problem?
 
Defragging can fail (I'm guessing here that you're on WinXP/using NTFS on the disk) if the Master File Table on the disk is extremely fragmented. You need a degree of free space (around 15% of the drive) to defrag as well. Also, I'd suspect that the drive is on it's way out - probably a victim of too many power fluctuations. I run 3TB of storage in my basement - the only drive I've had fail in the past 5 years was because of an errant power supply. All of my systems are on quality power supplies and uninterupptible battery backups now - both are worth the investment.

Backp up any data you can't reinstall (photos, documents, e-mails, etc) and run 'chkdsk C: /f' (again, on XP, 95/98/ME are different), see if it finds any errors. If it finds serious errors, or obvious mechanical problems continue, see if the drive is still under warranty. You should be able to find manufacturer and serial number on the top of the drive then look up warranty availability.
 
Yah its winxp. This is the only drive, besides and external 250GB WD drive that failed on me (Too much heat I think). There really is nothing important on the drive, they just use it for internet.

This failure has be worried about my setups now. My main rig and media pc are on high quailty surge protectors with line filtering (Tripplite's), no battery backed power supplies tho. They also have better powersupplies (Antec True420 and a Enermax480) unlike my parents which is just a prebuilt dell rig.

I have a little over 1TB of data between the two of them, I was just going to raid the drives in mirror mode for save keeping. However this has me thinking. Should I get a ups and better powersupplies, because I do not want to be replacing 300GB drives every year?
 
Hard Drives are xtremely precise mechanical devices. Scaled to human terms, a HDD in operation is roughly equivalent to rotating the Empire State Building on its side at 7200 RPM about a foot above a forest of trees without touching any of the trees. BTW, did I mention that all of the trees have to be the same height? Yes, stable power is extremely important to ensuring the longevity of a hard drive. Everybody makes fun of me for bringing a battery backup to LAN parties. Yes, if you value your hard drives and the data on them, you need to take power supply seriously - and not just inside your system, but all the way from the wall. Line Conditioners, or better yet, in line Battery Backups, ensure 120V, 60Hz gets to your Power Supply, which then delivers solid +5 and +12 to your hard drives. Everybody who posts "Help, my hard drive is dying" needs to take a real serious look at better protection, and once again, not just in the box, but all the way to the wall. Also, they need to look at creating PERMANENT backups of their data, so that they don't come running to the [H]ard|forum wanting someone to help them get it running long enough to get their data off of it. It really is a wonder that hard drives and PSUs work as well as they do with all sorts of line fluctuations coming in. Turning on the vacuum cleaner, brown outs, spikes, surges, line sags, etc can all cause long term damage to computer components, and you probably won't notice it right away. [/Soapbox]

CLEAN power is a must, or have fun with a carosuel of hard drive RMAs and replacements. Or you could be like me and keep 3 TB going with less than one failure a year. It's your choice. I have 19 PATA/IDE drives (9 Maxtor, 1 Samsung, 1 Seagate, and 8 WD), 4 SATA drives (2 WD Raptor, 2 Samsung), and 3 SCSI 10K drives (1 Fujitsu, 2 Seagate) and I have had ONE fail in the past two years. It was a WD1200JB, taken by a bad PSU when I decided to let my guard down and use a junk PSU to test a system. Never Again.
 
just another example that you cant judge a member by their title

welcome aboard DougLite ;)

great contribution
If I wasnt pressed for time Id relate largely the same example
 
DougLite said:
Scaled to human terms, a HDD in operation is roughly equivalent to rotating the Empire State Building on its side at 7200 RPM about a foot above a forest of trees without touching any of the trees. BTW, did I mention that all of the trees have to be the same height?
Click to expand...

Thank you. I've been trying to remember that example (or one close to it) for a while now. It helps explain things.

Good posts too.
 
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