Just finished installing Win98se Auto Patchers

[Nightsky]

Windows98se, Soyo6BA+IV, PC100

First let me say I truely appreciate all the work the MSFN members are doing. I look forward to exploring all the tools install w/hot fixes, updates, and patches it will be a challenging learning process for me. My win98se desktop looks great and its working fresh. I never listened to cds on my computer since my first packard bell. Its pretty nice. I love msfn

However, my problem is that I need to defrag this 160gb seagate ATA hard drive and when I try to use win98se defrag utility it hicups

I haven't sufficient memory and well I am running 640mb ram which maxes out this PIII600, ATA machine. Thing is that with your help this ole win98 box is running fine but its wasting too much space and I want to defrag install a partition manager and try some live CD OSs, VM, Linux with the hope of setting up this box as a file/web server???

I stumbled on your defrag project and it did not install with unofficial goodies... I did all the updating hoping that the w98 defragger would lose its "Not Enough Memory" hiccup but it did not. So I would appreciate any suggestions on how I should defrag. Thanks much.

[ldb]

Try doing the defrag in safe mode.

[noguru]

Considering the fact that you have a PIII I assume that your mainboard is old too. I don't think that your mainboard supports 48bits LBA and you have a 160 GB harddrive!

I don't know if this is the cause of your defragmenting problems, but it will cause future problems for sure.

If you installed all unofficial updates it should be possible to run your amount of RAM with W98 in most cases. Some people still report problems. Try taking out some memory from your machine and see if you can run defrag.

Or try another defragmenter, Diskeeper lite is free and a lot faster anyway. I don't like the Windows defrag, it's slow and the only way that I can defrag my C: drive without constant restarting is in safemode.

[Sfor]

The built in Windows 98 defragmentation utility does not work correctly with partitions exceeding 137GB. The solution is to split the drive to smaller partitions, or to use a third party defragmentation utility.