RE: Diskeeper seems to have locked up

[Michael W. Ellis]

Title: RE: Diskeeper seems to have locked up

Update:

 

After extended observation (I ended up pulling an all-nighter after working my normal day) there was no discernable disk activity on the machine.  Very reluctantly I rebooted the machine expecting to need to restore the volume from tape.  However, the machine came up without a hitch and seems to have suffered no ill effect.  After a day of continuous defragging my disk is only Moderately fragmented (as opposed to Heavily fragmented).  I'm in the process of moving extraneous data off the drive to other servers or to CD for archive purposes.  We will continue to aggressively defrag the drive and drop back to routine nightly or weekly defrags once the disk is in decent shape.

 

Thanks to all who responded, your comments and suggestions are appreciated.  After having been through all of this I can't help but wonder if reformatting the drive and restoring from tape might have been the easier path...

 

Michael Ellis

-----Original Message-----
From: Ray Zorz [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Thursday, August 16, 2001 11:44 AM
To: NT System Admin Issues
Subject: RE: Diskeeper seems to have locked up

By now it's been a few more hours. I wonder what the final result was.

-----Original Message-----
From: Diane Beckham [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Thursday, August 16, 2001 9:42 AM
To: NT System Admin Issues
Subject: RE: Diskeeper seems to have locked up

On a very badly fragmented drive sometimes it takes along time, especially
if you don't have a lot of open contiguous space for diskeeper to use.  You
also may have to defrag it a few times to get it cleaned up.  Try to move as
much data off that drive as possible and then defrag again and then move it
back. 

HTH,
Diane

-----Original Message-----
From: Michael W. Ellis [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Wednesday, August 15, 2001 9:11 PM
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

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