Quick help with defragging hard drive

[springlamb]

Am defragmenting this hard drive for the first time in 18 months .
It's been going since 1630.
Do you think I should leave it or have it gone awry?

Ta.
After 18 months there's probably a lot to do but it's just sitting there spinning at me. Wish it had one of those progress meters.

Be warned...you may even need to leave it on overnight!

I defraged a Windows 98 HDD once and it took about 7 hours. About one hour per gig...

XP is generally faster though. I can normally defrag in about 2-3 hours though i tend to do it every 6 months or so.

Definately one of those jobs you start and leave running when you go out for the day.

Thank you.
It's Vista HP. Eventually sorted itself out about 8pm. Then my finger slipped and I started it off again!

Running faster but still not what you'd expect. And switching between user accounts still very slow.

Never mind...

I assume this drive is formatted to be FAT32?

Win98 could well take a day to do a FAT32 drive, but XP takes about 5 minutes for an NTFS.

To be honest I didn't think XP took that long for FAT32 either, but most of my partitions are NTFS so it's not a fair test.

It's Vista, onagar, and NTFS.

I did laugh when the box for Next scheduled defragmentation said 'Never'.

My little computer rat man is going to have a look remotely later on about the low start ups and account switching. Norton still saying everything is OK.

Download and set Diskeper09 to run in the automatic mode and let it finish the job. It defrags even under low free space and extreme fragmentation with ease. Best defragger out there.
Here is the free 30 day trial
www.diskeeper.com/defrag.aspx

Tell him how long the defrag took. I just defraged an NTFS drive under XP that hadn't been done for a year at least and it took about 10 minutes.

If he checks in device manager under IDE he may find it's not running under UDMA but dropped down to some very slow compatibility mode. They do this if they have errors and you don't realise unless you know where to look.