Defrag not working

vinylmusic

Can anyone please offer a suggestioin
I'm trying to rescue an old computer for a friend. A pentium lll 500 running Win 98
He let his family run all kinds of games that filled up the hard drive (10gb)
I've deleted huge files and removed space hogging programs and now have 65% of the hard drive free.
It only had 64Mb memory so I added 256mb making it nearly 320
In spite of that I cant get the defrag tool in windows to work properly. It gives up before it really gets started.
Needless to say that the disc error checking tool packs up too

I'd appreciate any advice or recommendations of (preferably free) software that may do the trick

woo

you need to run a scandisk before defrag will work, you can configure scandisk to run at boot up.

MSDos.sys in the root directory can control if Scandisk is run or not. The [Options] section should be there already, don't duplicate.

[Options]
Autoscan=2

Debt_Free_Chick

Diskeeper Lite (free) is far superior to the basic Windows defrag.

I think the authors of Diskeeper helped Microsoft to develop the Windows defrag, so a much improved version appears in XP.

However, try the download and run Diskeeper instead.

Before ... either run scandisk from boot or in safe mode.

f1charlie

Something is probably running in the background, interrupting the tools running.

If you stick with the inbuilt tools, run them in safe mode.

Charlie

Little_John

If it is a while since both scan disk and defrag were used boot in safemode and run them in there.

to boot in to safe mode hit the f8 key a few times before you get the starting windows clouds screen and select option 3 safemode when it boot run scandisk and defreg

albertross_2

if you have the 98 CD, there is a file called defrag.inf on it, if you right click on it, then install, and reboot, defrag will run at startup, before anything else loads.