I don't have a complete answer to your question, but I want to 
clarify something which I don't think you quite understand, the 
difference between file problems that scandisk addresses, and 
fragmentation.

  scandisk is all about "does the file system on this drive make 
sense?"  It can find things like "this space is maked 'in use' 
but is not part of any file" (or, worse, seems to be part of 
more than one file!).  The kinds of errors that scandisk finds 
will mean the that data has been lost, and typically its fixes 
can at best ensure that NO MORE data will be lost from the same 
cause.  Occasionally it manages to do some of the steps of 
recovering lost data.

  fragmentation is purely a performance issue.  "might the 
system oprate a bit more efficiently is all of the pieces of 
this file were lined up next to each other?"  Defragmenting a 
drive means shuffling various pieces around to a more efficient 
arrangement on the drive.

  Defragmentation should NEVER be attempted on a drive that has 
any of the kinds of problems that scandisk checks for.  At best, 
it will make recovering lost data impossible.  At worst, it will 
turn a small amount of data loss into a much larger amount of 
data loss....
  A freshly defragmented drive should always pass scandisk with 
flying colours -- even if it shouldn't because there were 
problems before it was defragmented.  They're beyond detection 
or correction now.

  SO:  IF you suspect a file system problem, scandisk is the 
tool you want.  Only if you are seeing a *performance* problem 
(and nothing else strange) should you resort to defragmentation.

David Gillett



Date sent:      	Mon, 17 Aug 2009 14:46:21 -0500
Send reply to:  	Personal Computer Hardware discussion List
             	<[log in to unmask]>
From:           	Reggkay <[log in to unmask]>
Subject:        	[PCBUILD] Hard drive problem?
To:             	[log in to unmask]

> Hi,
> I'm having something going on with my hard drive and was wondering if
> you could tell me what to do about it.  Saturday I uninstalled
> Microsoft office and then attempted to reinstall it.  It gave me an
> error and said that one of the installation files was already on my
> hard drive.  So per Microsoft I renamed the old file and installation
> proceeded normally.  I ran my Saturday maintence of spybot/windows
> update/etc. and then I defragged.  Thats when it came up with a 3.33
> gb fragment.  It also showed that there were 29 other fragments of
> various sizes.  The computer during this time slowed to a crawl.  So
> today I thought I would rerun defragmenter and the results were that
> it gave me one huge fragment of 3.34 gb of owner\application.  I
> restarted and tried to run scan disk and it took 2 seconds and booted
> into windows.  Any ideas of what is going on here?  Suggestions on
> what to try? Thanks in advance for your help, Regina Long Sapulpa
> Windows XP Pro version 2002 112 GB hard drive AMD athlon 64 Processor
> 4000+ 2.39 GHz, 448 MB of Ram
> 
>          PCBUILD maintains hundreds of useful files for download
>                      visit our download web page at:
>                   http://freepctech.com/downloads.shtml
> 

         PCBUILD maintains hundreds of useful files for download
                     visit our download web page at:
                  http://freepctech.com/downloads.shtml