Defragmentation software for Win9x

[dencorso]

"The boot area on this drive contains invalid information about the drive's free space."

That occurs 99 percent because the PC crashed, the PC was hard powered off or you pressed the case reset button.

That is a real problem which plagues both Win 9x/ME and their underlying DOSs. NDD finds it reliably and corrects it flawlessly every time it arises. Such problem happens every time the OS doesn't update one single variable in the FSINFO sector of the partition. That can be due to a crash, but it can equally be due to any minor falure at shutdown (or reboot) time, minor enough to pass otherwise undetected. There's nothing to worry about, as the OS can keep working with that variable incorrect, but fixing it makes the OS faster and sharper.

[RJARRRPCGP]

I have considered this problem to be unsolvable, although I suspect that it's caused by using a 120GiB HDD which the BIOS reports as 64GB.

That's a problem! That will cause ScanDisk to report tons of bad clusters on the HDD after about 50 percent! And ScanDisk will claim impending hard disk failure. (if your partition is bigger than about 60 GiB!)

The only work around is to HPA your HDD to cap it at 64 GB or less.

[Multibooter]

I frequently create under Win98, with Norton Ghost v11.0.2 (standalone) and the switches -z9 -cns -fatlimit -szee in the desktop shortcut, backups of the WinXP(FAT32) partition. Before creating the .gho file of the WinXP(FAT32) partition, I boot into WinXP(NTFS) and defragment from there the WinXP(FAT32) partition with PerfectDisk v8.0.67, then I boot back into Win98 to create the .gho partition image

This was my initial posting in this topic. I have learnt a lot since then.

1) Defragging before creating a .gho image with the switches -z9 -cns -fatlimit -szee is a useless undertaking. Ghost with these switches does not care whether the source partition is fragmented or not, and ignores the specific position of files on the source partition. The files on the partition restored from a .gho file created with these switches will be positioned according to Ghost's likings, not how they were originally arranged on a possibly de-fragmented source partition. Any optimized file positioning by defraggers on the source partition will not exist anymore on the partition restored with these switches from a .gho image.

How do you defrag your HDDs?

I don't routinely defragment but the Windows ME Defrag can handle it.

Definitely makes sense. If one frequently restores partitions with the above switches, as is typical for a development enviroment, the HDD should not be substantially fragmented and using defragmentation software may not be useful

One could actually defrag a partition by creating a .gho image of it with the above switches and then restoring it to the HDD. The resulting restored partition will have one block, with 0 file fragments, but the directories will not be defragged.

2) If one creates a sector-by-sector image, however, as with the Ghost switches -ia -ib (or -ir), then defragging the HDD prior to creating an image may be useful.

Creating a sector-by-sector image, however, takes MUCH longer and should be preceded by a time-consuming prior sdelete of free space, to avoid HUGE .gho image files.

Edited December 4, 2010 by Multibooter

[tsampikos]

I didn't see it mentioned above, hopeffulle i didn't miss a post about it, so I will mention here what I use. I use "DEFRAG TO SHUTDOWN". Which is a little program that launches the built in scandisc and defrag programs of Windows 9x. adding new features like "full defragmentation and optimization", "disable screensaver", "reboot or shutdown after defrag" etc. It's freeware and I am very satisfied with it. It can be used in all Win 9x. Versions (95-98-Me).

http://medlem.spray.se/mokkelmannen/

Edited September 6, 2011 by tsampikos