Okay, I’m now in hour 2 of my defrag. Every time I get it started up, it gets to 10% then re-starts. I’ve shut down just about every program on the system, and it -still- says there’s something changing on the drive. How the heck am I supposed to stop this and get my defrag to work?
Just about every program isn’t going to cut it. hit ctrl-alt-del and close everything you recognize and you know is a non-system element. Also, disconnect any network cables and external drives/attachments (cable modems/dsl modems can occasionally mess things up, as well things like palm pilot synch stations.) Although I assume you are aware of this, don’t do anything at all on your computer during the defrag.
Antivirus software is all but guaranteed to kill a defrag at 10%. Also be sure your screen saver is disabled.
Yeah, screen saver is the biggie if you don’t just sit there jiggling the mouse like I do. If I defrag about once every two weeks, it only tales about 5 minutes to run through on a win-98 box with a 600 Hz processor and 300+ Megs RAM with a 4 gigs of info on the disk… YMMV
Most of the time they slow down at 10% for some reason.
What kind of computer is this? What operating system? Try another defrag program from download.com they have some you can try.
Thanks, all, for the advice. Shutting -everything- else down did the trick. The defrag took 3 hours, but it worked, and everything does seem to be running a bit more smoothly now. 2 bad sectors were found and sent to their rooms without supper.
From my experience it’s sort of a 2 steps forward 1 step back type of deal. It restarts, but it speeds past the defragged portion of the HD, doing some more work before restarting and beginning the process again.
Perhaps thats why my comp takes 14 or so hours to defrag. 
I have a 40 gig on a 2.4ghz & mine takes about 10 min to defrag once a week with XP…