There isn't such thing (I mean safe defrag) based on my exp. I have seen not
once but number of times that defrag result lost data and/or damage operation
system (with win95 defrag, win98 defrag and norton utility). The worset one
happened was to my win98 machine at home 4 months ago, it appeared to be good
and successful, but when I restarted computer, I lost my win98 and uncountable
time to re-download software and lost money (I have limited download balance per
month, any extra download cost me money). Since then, I have never done defrag
once at home (in fact I removed defrag from win98), and be very careful to do
defrag at work (I never do it without full backup first -- xcopy HDD).

J Qian

"Twin*.*Star" wrote:

> You might be correct now. Just know that way back when in the DOS (for you
> newbies that is before Win9x <G>) days when I used Norton Speed Disk, they
> (the Norton group, when Mr.(Mr. out of respect)  Norton still own/ran it and
> I trusted software that had his name on it.)  were very specific to back up
> the hard drive BEFORE during a defrag because  of the possibility of lost
> data during defragging for reasons I have described previously. Maybe things
> have changed but I personally have not read that to be true. Does not mean
> it is not accurate now, just have not seen documentation to contradict that
> last documentation I have read from Peter Norton (by the way the Win98
> Defrag is based on the Norton design as opposed to the Win95 version which
> was not as accurate and efficient).

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