a friend of mine is still using WIN 98 and has NEVER defragged it because she didn't know how. Your humble servant figured I'd impress her by showing her how.
Unfortunately her defrag WIN 98 prg would not complete the task.
It kept stopping at 2 % and then returning to 0 %.
Any suggestions?
Are there any free defrag prgs still around that will work with WIN 98 ? TIA.

Hi Denny9
Firstly welcome back to CompuForums. Remember that if you can't help us by making a couple of posts that are not related to your own problems we cannot help you. These do not need to be technical at all.

To be honest, the most efficent method would be to transfer all of the files on the HD to a external hard drive and put them back again. Window$ will arrange them in an efficent way. You can't do this from the drive that Windows booted from however.

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It stopped at 2% where, in the analysis, or in the actual defrag part? If the former, you should probably reload, as the system will surly need it. If the latter, windows is working on it. It needs at least 15% of the hard drive free, and plenty of ram. It may seem like it's starting over from scratch, but it has done a lot of work, and needs to reassess how its changes are affecting the process. I'd say if it's restarting after working on the actual defrag/compression part, then let it go.. go to a movie, a night out on the town, to bed, to the store, and come back in at least 6 or 12 hours. It will take that long if it's never been cleaned up before. I know, my brothers took 16 hours the first time he defragged. He learned!!!

thanks. I hadn't thought of trying this method. Only one concern - will a new external drive work with WIN 98 ?
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This user added the following:
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Not sure where it stopped but I've told her to try again and leave her computer on overnight.

My windows 98 machine took about 7 days to do a defrag, and this was on a 30Gb hard drive and 128Mb ram

so id atleast do 12 or more Hrs and see where it gets

In Win98, any change to the hard drive during the defrag process will cause it to restart, thus the long defrag times.

Disconnect from the net, and shutdown networking, turn off your virus scanner, turn off any screen savers, shut down anything in the task scheduler, turn off any uneeded processes that are running in the background from the task manager. Usually you can do some of this by right clicking on the little icons in the lower right hand corner and exiting the processes.

Really, this works...once you stop whatever is writing to the drive, the defrag will fly through to its finish.