Most Fragmented Hard Drive EVER!

Heh I remember one time I was at a friends house and we formatted his machine, after installing and cleaning up the drive we went to defrag it (this was in the DOS/Win3.1 days) and the pattern on the disk looked like something from space invaders.
 
SparkedFire said:
LOL. I see that all the time. The top half of the browser is covered in toolbars. I ask, "you use all of these?"
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ie-toolbar-bloat.jpg
 
I have seen worse a sbs 2003 server sql + exchange + an admin that " does not like to defrag it may kill it " I also had to deal with a exchange server in a COLO with 99% frag and no contiguous data. at least that is what diskeeper took 6 days to defrag the exchange db and 2 months to defrag the log and os drives almost just restored it.
 
cyclone3d said:
I've seen worse as well.... ALL red with less than 3MB free left on the hard drive.
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That had to have ran like an old 386! Oh the days. I remember being pissed because I couldn't play the Quake 1 demo since I didn't have a co/math processor.
 
if the disk gets less then 10-15% free space the ntfs driver can no longer keep the file system from falling into that state, what you posted is more user fault as you posted it had 3mb free space left i be surprised if the system was even working correctly due to lack of space

cloning the disk using norton ghost to an new disk would of resulted in an clean defragmented file system (mite take 6hrs or more to copy it thought but you not posted the detailed log it makes),note using acrons true image does an sector based copy (why its so fast at copying disks) so the resulting file system on the new hdd would still be fragmented
 
There are plenty of freeware defragers that will do it in the back ground if you're still running older than Vista or Win7.
 
Could you imagine how long it would take to open a file if it were a MFM hard drive?
 
This is on one of the lovely Dell's were provided at work....just opening a browser causes the HDD light to trash for ages.

IMAG0277.jpg
 
some of the drives at the law firm i am @ were worse, i set them all up to defragment now and did a cleaner wipe too
 
My dedicated torrent download disk looks about the same or worse if its full ^_^

I use one 300GB Raptor as download disk (as my main PC is SSD only now ;-), ware files get dumped, moving files from that disk i get around 10 to 25% of the normal speed out of that disk, when moving files from there to the raid 5 array
 
call "C:\Program Files\CCleaner\CCleaner.exe" /AUTO

cd c:\windows\system32
defrag.exe c:

I put this in a BAT file and schedule it to run once a week for my customers that still have XP.
 
I don't know how they lived with it. I have had hard drives with much less fragmentation and I had to defrag just to keep my sanity.
 
I've seen similar before several times. These drives are typically one partition, and have been full or less than 15% empty for years, the only time space being freed up is when they juggle stuff around to install something. Every time the add more things the OS struggles to find a clear spot so the drive gets worse and worse over the years.

Instead of worrying about a defrag just get them a new drive first, then worry about it.
 
Ok, proceed to whale on my dumb ass, but this question has to be asked:

Doesn't running defrag weekly burn out the hard drive a ton quicker?
 
I used to have an old Compaq, bought it in 1998, and it cost $300 back then. It was cheap, and sloooooow. I think I learned about fragmentation around 2005 or 2006, and tried defragmenting it. It took 3 DAYS STRAIGHT to defragment that, and it was only an 8GB disk. The entire house sounded like a dying hard drive, that thing was so loud. It sounded like a metal shop day and night.
 
fatrat said:
Ok, proceed to whale on my dumb ass, but this question has to be asked:

Doesn't running defrag weekly burn out the hard drive a ton quicker?
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not really. think of it this way, you might have to do a lot more writing up front but it would be easier on the heads reading the rest of the time. that isn't the exact case at all but its a good visualization.
 
My grandmothers was this bad when I did it a few months back, and she had like every possible adware and other BS on her computer possible. So I fixed all of that, and installed spybot and taught her how to use it. Her computer is running MUCH faster now, and she cryed a little bit. Lol, silly old lady's.
 
wow, I guess that's what happens when people don't properly take care of their PCs.
 
fatrat said:
Ok, proceed to whale on my dumb ass, but this question has to be asked:

Doesn't running defrag weekly burn out the hard drive a ton quicker?
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Yes, it creates more wear and tear, but in the grand scheme of things it's minimal and the benefits outweigh the risks. Using the same logic you could argue that using the system daily burns out the drive.

The modern equiv of this are the people who claim that keeping a swap file on a SSD will kill it. It's more wear yes, but are you going to wake up a year from now to a dead drive? Not likely.
 
I took care of office computers late last years that were with XP Pro installs on SATA1 drives, running 3 ghz P4s with hyper-threading and the lot - the health of those drives makes me wonder if too much fragmentation from a bad file system can kill a drive.

They were office machines from a car sales joint, all in such bad condition (tried on a newer healthy controller to verify) it was like they had been 24/7/365 active server drives, but they were not. XP fragmentation victims or long past their lifetime operation?
 
heck if you guys want pics of dumb user crap I see in the shop, get ready for a deluge :)
 
solid red means fragmented, right?

I use Diskeeper (have for a long time). Ultimately no better than just having a nightly midnight defrag with Windows Defragmenter, and no better than any free software out there. Only difference though is that unlike Windows Defrag, Diskeeper automatically "defrags" files by having Windows place them in the right location in the first place.
 
Wow... that's about as fragged as me during my old Rocket Arena 2 days when my dialup provider started sucking egg yolks. :eek:
 
See it occasionally in our shop. It's not common, but not all that rare either.

90%+ fragmentation does get your attention though.
 
And people who have only used Microsoft products wonder why real geeks point at them and laugh.

Fragmentation, really?
 
Wumpus said:
And people who have only used Microsoft products wonder why real geeks point at them and laugh.
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This wasn't really a Microsoft problem. XP is an old operating system and defragging old, slow hard drives was a pain in the ass. Nowadays better file system allocation schemes have been introduced in every major operating system to reduce the fragmentation issue, but NTFS, ext3/4, and HFS+ can all become fragmented over time.
 
I'll up you all one.
"Friend of a friend" left me this PC to fix
Had a "bluescreen problem" > turned out it was an in-progress installation of Windows he referred to as the "bluescreen" (deleting the installation files and restoring the boot.ini fixed that "problem"

They say a picture says more than a thousand words:
Defrag.png
 
i remember seeing one in the old computer shop, win 98 and when i ran disk defrag is said it had been 1300 something days since it last ran, lol
 
A friend of mine still(!) has one of those stupid fucking Sony PCs, with a default partition of 10Gb for C: and everything else in (? E: ?). Programs installed by default to C: and filled everything, then she ran it for years, installed every 'helper' toolbar ever made for IE and didn't question why anything was slow.

I didn't bother defragging (was there drinking, no tools), just reinstalled using the shitty Sony disc and made the C: partition as large as the software allowed--30Gb. :rolleyes:
 
beowulf7 said:
Holy cow. :eek: "View Report" should've scolded its owner. :D
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Yea tell me about it, computer is of course full of Viruses and shit too
First scanned it with Macafee Stinger from my BartPE USB stick (where I also took the Defrag screenshot)
It found 12 viruses
Then booted it up to the Windows install after my "fix" and installed Symantec Corporate Antivirus

It found another 55 viruses...
Gonna run ESET free online scanner tonight to see what more it can find

Still fighting Viruses residing in the C:\System Volume Information\_Restore directory
Even though I deleted the restore points from the "disk cleanup" wizard, and then went on to also disable System restore which accoridng to Microsoft should have deleted all restore points.
Guess I'll just give up on that and do a "rm -rf" on the *** directory to get it purged of Viruses and other crap! (It sits at 6431 files and 5.7GB after said operation has been performed...)
 
simple solution:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda

MUAHAHAHAHA!

no more fragmentation, in fact no more of anything!
 
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