Defrag sticks and won't run

Helpline Q&A Directory

I'm running Windows Me and am unable to use its Disk Defragmenter tool. I select Defrag, click on the C drive, then hit the Start button. The defrag window appears to work, as the defrag illustration shows files flying through the air. But the progress bar constantly sticks at zero percent.

I once let it run for 19 hours, just to see if it was incredibly slow, but it still showed zero percent complete. I've gone through my computer but can't find anything wrong. Can you help?

The disk maintenance tools supplied with Windows are very poor, particularly when faced with the large C drives found on most machines. If you must defragment your disks regularly, and complete the task in a reasonable length of time, it will help considerably to split your hard disk into several logical drives of, say, 2GB each. However, this shouldn't be necessary.

The values shown in the progress bar give you a clue as to what's going on. Zero to four percent shows that Windows is running ScanDisk in the background to check that the disk is okay before it starts. From five to nine percent, Windows builds a 'road map' of the best locations to put things on the disk. Above this percentage, the actual defragmentation is taking place.

In your case, it would seem that ScanDisk is the sticking point, so try running a manual ScanDisk to see if you can find out what's going wrong.

To help ScanDisk and Defragmenter tasks to complete quickly, clean boot Windows (see tip, Clean boot windows Me) before you start. See also tip Defrag terminates before completion.