Windows Dfrag problem.

[Gnu_Raiz]

Has anyone else noticed that if you run Windows Defrag on a full drive it corrupts your harddrive? I have Windows XP Pro on a 40 gig hard drive with less then 4 gig's left, I ran defrag, a popup note told me that windows prefers 15% free space click yes or no to defrag, so I pressed yes. After some time it seemed normal, I then rebooted and it would not boot, not even to safe mode.

I had to pull out my disk diagnositic, the software said my harddrive failed the tests, cause it was corrupt. So I had to do a secure erase and format. After it was done I ran the program diagnositic again and it came back with a clean bill of health. It seems that windows corrupted all my data, damn windows. This was on a ntfs file system, I have over 1 gig of memory in that machine, seems like windows defrag can not even do anything right.

Gnu_Raiz

[Aurthus]

Windows Defrag is not the best software but it does semi work. you should have 15% free space to allow it enough room to move large/multiple files around. It will often fail or lock up if it attempts to move large clusters but has no place to temperaraly put them. It's also known for lockups/restarts if you have any background apps running. It sounds as if it were attempting to move some system files but either had no place to put them or an app wrote to the hd and def attempted to restart but locked up, leaving you with currupt files.

As i said though, its not a very good program.. i have 20% free space and hl2/cs/steam all will not defrag because Win Defrag will not compress my contiguous files to free up a large enough block of freespace : /

[Gnu_Raiz]

So what defrag program does everyone use? I have heard that some comerical applications are almost as bad. Does anyone have any preference or just keep 15% free on the intended drive.

Anyway I am getting a new Harddrive using the suspect drive as a backup media storage.

Gnu_Raiz

[saturnotaku]

Diskeeper Pro 9.0. I would run into some strange issues with previous versions, but they seem to have gotten most everything right with this one. If that doesn't work well for you, Perfect Disk is a great alternative.