I have a gateway computer with a ten gigabite hard drive. I cannot defrag if for some odd reason. It reaches 34% and stops. I have less 500 megabites left and I have deleted everything I don't need, including cache, all to no avail. Something is eating up my space everyday. I have virus protection with updates everyweek so I don't think it is a virus. How can I get my hard drive back? Also, I only use my computer for the internet. Thanks Jay

After you have backed up everything you want to save off of it....

Delete all partitions (Fdisk) Recreate partitions and format.

MAKE SURE YOU BACKUP the drive before you do this.
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To run defrag, you need to turn off everything else that is running.  Be sure to get all TSR's.  Sometimes it's difficult to stop everything, so here's a nifty little tool that will do it for you.  My husband uses this all the time.  He really likes it.  There's a freeware version here.  That's what he uses.
[url]http://www.powerdefrag.com/[/url]

Also, run defrag twice in a row.  The first time will defrag your files and folders...the second will defrag your O/S.  

The next thing you need to worry about is what is eating up your hard drive.  Double and triple check for viruses.  It sure sounds like you have one.  If you're absolutely sure you don't have one, then you need to do a surface scan on your hard disk.  You might have bad sectors.  

That's the best I can tell you with the information that you gave.  Good luck!

XM777...don't you think that's a little drastic?  Do you reformat your hard drive every time you have a problem?  You must spend a lot of time reloading software. [whacko]

if you're almost full on as ten gigabyte drive, it's time to consider a much bigger hard drive. and they're dirt cheap these days. the closer you get to capacity on drives the slower they get, and they do become resistant to defragging when they get real full. XM777 has the right idea too. you will want to purge and reinstall.

I have a Mac but I came across the same problem.  I ran Tech Tool to Optimize (de-frag) and would only get so far before the system froze. The same thing happened when I booted from another CD and used Disk First Aid, which also has a de-frag program.   I was already planning on getting a new and larger hard drive but wanted to know what was causing frequent sytem freezes...the hard drive (bad sector) or possibly a bad memory module or extension conflict.  The guy that put the new drive in blamed it on the upgrade processor card but I'm still not sure.  I reset the clock speed to the default settings and it seems to be OK and at least has not failed to boot as had been the case before.

Not really. If you read jay29's post he mentions that "Something is eating up my space everyday" plus, taking into consideration that defrag will not complete, add it all up and it looks like a bad boot sector (IMHO).

IRL I support 1200+ PC's in a networked environment. When faced with this situation, SOP is to reformat and reload. Of course when using images on a RIS Server, it only requires < 1 minute of human intervention.

Good Luck Jay29!!

It sounds like "Virtual Memory is eating up your available HD space.

Buy a bigger hard drive, and find someone that has a disk copying utility like Norton Ghost to copy the old disk to the new.

Jay
[img]http://www.commspeed.net/jmurray/images/iroc-cop.gif[/img]

Change your settings so that your virtual memory is a constant size.  Do this by going to

START>SETTINGS>CONTROL PANEL> SYSTEM. Click the PERFORMANCE tab then click the VIRTUAL MEMORY BUTTON. Click the radio button that says "Let me specify my virtual memory settings." You should make this the same size as the amount of RAM you have in your system.  ie, if you have 128 Meg of RAM, make your virtual memory (disk cache) 128MB.  See if this stops the growth of info on your hard disk

BTW, a LITTLE growth of hard disk data is not unsusal as some programs save data as they are used.

Defrag your drive with the computer in SAFE MODE.  This prevents the startup of other programs that can interfere with defrag.

Finally, 10 Gig just isn't that big anymore.  Make sure your problems are fixed but get yourself another hard drive.  Hell I run two 17s and I'm in need of more space.

Mike