How to: Perform a Full Manual Defrag of Your HDD under Vista

[Guest Tiberius]

Vista is so user friendly.. what you could do with XP with the interface now

you need a command line.. LOL

Simplicity or crapicity? Vista is such a fiasco...

 

End Of Comment, start of article:

 

http://keznews.com/3487_How_to_Perform_a_Full_Manual_Defrag_of_Your_HDD_under_Vista

 

If you have tried doing a defragmentation of your hard disk under Windows

Vista, you would have noticed that the defrag utility does not really give

you any detailed information about your hard disk fragmentation level, show

you the defragmentation progress while defragging, and in certain situations

even defragment when you ask it to. Thanks to myhousefor this article.

 

This guide shows you how you can perform a full defrag of your hard disk

under Vista and get at least a basic report on your hard disk fragmentation

before and after defragmentation.

 

 

What's Happening Here

There are a number of changes between Windows Vista's defragmenter and XP's

defrag tool. In general, Vista's defragger is designed for the average user

and is thus tuned for automatic behind-the-scenes work: by default, the

defrag utility is scheduled to run weekly. It defragments all the partitions

on all your hard disks automatically. Unlike the Windows XP defragmentation

tool however, it will only defragment files with fragments smaller than 64

MB on NTFS file systems. The lack of any useful user interface in the Vista

defrag utility is consistent with this design decision of having an

automated defragger running behind the scenes without user intervention.

 

Before you get too upset, let me say that this is a generally useful setting

for the average user. Let's face it, if you are reading this, you are not an

average user. Many users I know don't defragment their hard disks. They

don't even know the concept, let alone how to get it done or what use it may

serve. The default Vista setting is sensible for such users - a weekly

schedule is more than adequate: too frequent and the constant

defragmentation causes additional wear and tear on the hard disk for very

little additional gain. And for most people, not moving file fragments if

they are more than 64 MB is a good compromise - it speeds up the whole

defragging process, and the fragments are large enough so that in most cases

they don't cause significant slowdowns in the system.

 

 

Manual Defragmentation

There are of course reasons why you might want to override this default

mechanism. For example, a full defragmentation of the hard disk may speed up

certain hard disk backup operations. If you're doing it on a large scale

with many computers, the time savings when backing up a properly defragged

hard disk compared to one where the files are broken into many fragments may

be significant. Another possible reason might be if you are capturing video

on your computer and don't want any frames to be skipped if the disk is

fragmented without a contiguous free space for the entire video file, the

hard disk head may have to skip over occupied sectors in the middle of

recording, causing your recording software to skip frames.

 

To get Vista's defragger to give you some information about your hard disk,

and to control which hard disk or partition it defragments, you will need to

use the command line defragmentation utility. It will still not give you any

feedback while defragmenting, just as the GUI version of the defragmenter

will not, but at least you can get information on the fragmentation level of

your hard disk, control whether to defragment even if the file fragments are

larger than 64 MB, and control which partition or hard disk to defragment.

 

To use the command line defrag tool in Windows Vista, you have to run the

Command Prompt as an administrator. In Vista, this is not automatic even if

you are logged in as the administrator. Click the Windows button (previously

the Start button in earlier versions of Windows), the All Programs menu item

and the Accessories menu item. Right click the "Command Prompt" button and

select "Run as administrator". A command prompt window will appear.

Everything you run in this Window will be run with administrator rights.

 

1. To view a file fragmentation analysis of (say) your C: drive, type:

 

defrag c: -a -v

 

The "-a" parameter tells the defragger to perform a fragmentation analysis.

The "-v" option tells it to be verbose in its report. If you want a report

on drive D: or some other drive, substitute that drive letter in place of

c:.

 

Be aware that defrag may tell you that you have no fragmented files even if

you have some. On NTFS partitions, the reporting function of defrag does not

consider fragmented files with fragments greater than 64 MB as fragmented.

If you need truly detailed information, you may have to consider getting a

third party defragmenter such as those listed on the Free Defragmentation

Utilities page on thefreecountry.com.

 

2. To defragment a particular drive, say C:, type:

 

defrag c: -v -r

 

The "-r" option tells the defragmentation utility to treat files that are

fragmented with 64 MB fragments or larger as though they are not fragmented.

This partial defragmentation is the default for "defrag", and it's the only

way the GUI defragmenter in Vista works.

 

You can also force the defragmenter to defragment everything. That is, even

if the file fragments are larger than 64MB, the Vista defragmenter will

still attempt to put the file into contiguous sectors. To do this, run the

defragger with the following options:

 

defrag c: -v -w

 

As you have probably have guessed, "-w" tells the Vista defrag tool to do a

full defragmentation. All file fragments will be consolidated where

possible.