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Using XP to defrag large FAT32 sata hard drive


Nomen

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Over the past few days I've had a 750 gb sata hard drive connected to an XP system and have been trying to defrag it, but even after a day or two of what looks like solid activity I don't even see a progress bar.  I see that it's saying the drive is being defragged, and a graph showing the layout (where the fragmented files are).  I've free'd up about 150 gb of space on the drive (because defrag complains when there is less than 15% free drive space) but that doesn't seem to make things go faster.  Is XP defrag the wrong tool to use on large FAT32 drives?  Is there a better program out there?  (edit:  should I try defragging it while connected to a Win-7 system?)

 

 

Edited by Nomen
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I like something called Contig for that you can download contig from sysinternals/Microsoft.  Then Put the Contig gui in the same directory.  This is much better than windows defrag.  Ok I realized that sysinternal programs are constantly being upgraded, some may no longer work on XP if version doesn't work just look for older contig.

Free

https://en.softonic.com/download/contig/windows/post-download?sl=1

Free

http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/Hard-Disk-Utils/Power-Defragmenter.shtml

Edited by Destro
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Well, Wincontig is actually "better" if you want a GUI tool (but it has also command line interface):

http://wincontig.mdtzone.it/en/index.htm

and JFYI, softonic is not the "ideal" place to download files from, Contig can (and should) be obtained from:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/contig

(even if not specified, the current 1.8 version works on XP just fine)

jaclaz

 

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