On some heavily fragmented workstations, I have seen the defrag process take
several hours to make a pass through the drive, expecially if the empty
space is low - like 25% of the drive. Having low free space seems to really
slow things down and also to prevent it from doing a thorough job. On a
couple of engineering workstations I had to make multiple passes to get a
drive cleaned up - be it FAT or NTFS. Over half full drives take Forever
to defrag.
On the new servers I have built where I have Diskeeper, I have installed it
at the build time and started the random defrag process and they have not
gotten very fragmented at all, but there is LOTS of room for Diskeeper to
manuver on the new boxes.
Good luck and remember that patience is a virtue ;)
Len Hammond
Network Administrator
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
-----Original Message-----
From: Michael W. Ellis [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Thursday, August 16, 2001 12:11 AM
To: NT System Admin Issues
Subject: Diskeeper seems to have locked up
So, dedicated admin that I am, I came back tonight to perform a boot time
defrag on a server that has been sorely neglected for way too long. The box
is a Dell Poweredge 4200 with three 9 Gig SCSI drives partitioned into a 2
Gig FAT and the remainder in a single NTFS partition. I boot-defragged the
FAT partition with no problems. After rebooting I setup Diskeeper (5.0
server) to boot-defrag the NTFS partition. Upon reboot, the box runs CHKDSK
and then starts the defrag.
Stage 0 - minimize MFT fragmentation - seems to have completed with no
problems
Stage 1 - Gathering partition data - no problems
Stage 3 - Clearing directory & attribute target area - this climbed to 25%
and has been there for nearly an hour now with no discernable activity
on-screen or with the disk drives.
I don't have a good feeling about this at all. I am tempted to leave the
server running as-is until tomorrow morning, hoping that Diskeeper is just
having to think real hard. The downside to this is that if Diskeeper is
really hung (as it appears) I then have to listen to my users whine while I
restore the server.
I guess the point of my post is to ask if anyone else has had Diskeeper lock
up like this, or if it is likely that waiting until morning is worthwhile or
simply wishful thinking.
Thanks,
Michael Ellis
http://www.sunbelt-software.com/ntsysadmin_list_charter.htm
http://www.sunbelt-software.com/ntsysadmin_list_charter.htm
