Lost hard drive space after degfrag

I recently upgraded to Windows Vista Ultimate (clean install) and after transferring over some files I deleted the windows.old file and gained back about over 22 gigs of space on my hard drive.

Well, after installing some programs I decided to defrag the hard drive. When I started I had about 41 gigs of space and after 3 hours of defragmentation I was at about 32.5 gigs of space on my hard drive!!!!

I had to leave somewhere so I stopped the degfrag and decided to run it again overnight but now I'm pissed I'm going to lose more space. Aside from that, when I ran the defrag a second time (just to let it analyze) Windows told me my system did not need to defrag at this time!!!

I have no idea how I could lose that much disk space on an incomplete defrag. Is this a common Windows Vista thing? I'm freaking pissed now

 

sounds like a drag. i would download and try auslogics disk defrag. it rules over vista's defrag. defrag with that and then have a look at it. 3 hours to defrag is crazy. how big is the drive? my 160 gb drive defrags in minutes with auslogics. windows practically always says you don't need to defrag. i've actually only seen windows suggest defragmentation twice. you can defrag anyway if you want...

 

you dont lose space during a defrag...dont listen to 000111 either.

you most likely lost space due to the system restore of windows. it is safe to defrag even if it says you dont need to.

 

ya. don't listen to me. listen to nizzy. he said basically the same thing, without suggesting an alternate defrag program. lol. what is your major damage, nizz?

 

no hard feelings, but you cant defrag a several hundred gb hard drive in minutes. I know you know what defragging does, well i'm assuming you do, but actually moving around all that data takes time.

 

um. i defrag in a couple minutes all the time. i haven't timed it- but it definitely takes less than 5 minutes. BUT i defrag pretty often, so if his drive is more fragmented it could take longer. are we really arguing over how long it takes me to defrag my hard drive? wow. i assume he has a laptop hard drive- and they aren't that big yet. did you ever get that 320 GB hard drive btw?

either way, 3 hours is way too long. in my experience auslogics defrag is MUCH faster than windows defrag. just a suggestion.

wOOt!

 

its not too long for defragging right after windows is installed for the first time...but it very much so depends on the speed of the hard drive.

on some old computers i would need to make images for, if i made the image on their stock 10ish gb hard drive from scratch, when i defrag at the end would need to be left going over night...but when the same image is done on the same computer with a new fast 7200 rpm drive, it cuts it down to 30 ish minutes...so it really depends on the hard drive....Thats why we use fast hard drives for our image machines now

 

I don't want to start a flame war here , but I don't think Auslogics does a complete job. I've used it, and it's just plain _too_ quick compared to PerfectDisk, UltraDefrag (I'm using now) and even Defraggler by Piriform. Just my opinion, of course as I can't prove it. Ultradefrag is a pretty powerful program, and is open source. It can defrag at boot and move the system files.

 

IIRC Vista default uses 15% of drive size for shadow copy by default. You might want to reduce the storage size if it has taken too much space. Here's a link for more info

http://www.mydigitallife.info/2007/...rage-space-usage-size-in-vista-with-vssadmin/

I used Auslogics and I agree it's fast, way too fast. Is it doing its job properly? I don't know, but I think i'll stick with Vista defrag for now.

 

ah. too good to be true, aye? maybe someone who knows could chime in here with some facts? so, what do you guys think the auslogics is doing, a half defrag or something? interesting. would be nice to know more than just our opinions...

as a from the hip test for auslogics, i will defrag with auslogics, then with windows- then i will at least know if windows defrag 'agrees' with the auslogics... if windows finds no files to defrag i will take it as evidence auslogics has done fine.

edit, the verdict: after an auslogics defrag, windows defrag found 1 file to defrag. it did, however, move some files around. so it does do a more complete job! lesson learned. ultradefrag sounds sweet- open source rules. maybe it's time to change.

edit: hahahahaha... ultradefrag = bsod.

 

I'm using Diskeeper and it took over 7 hrs to defrag a 20GB partition so I just stopped it even though you're not suppose too,,,then again I only have 2% free space on that partition and 228mb of RAM,,,

 

Well, I ran th defrag overnight and come to find out I went from 32.3 GB of space to 42.9 GB of space.

The one confusing thing to me is how I went from 41 GB before the defrag, to 32.3 GB after the defrag (which I stopped after 3 hours) to now 42.9 GB

What the hell is Windows Vista doing?

 

you may have had a big set of files that it was in the progress of moving when you decided to stop it. defragging has to copy the entire file to its new location before it can remove the old file in the old location, so you likely had temporarily a large file mid transit.

lesson for you to learn, don't quit a defrag mid process.

 

All this "testing" of defrag apps is just hilarious! As if defraging with one and then defragging again with another is going to prove ANYTHING.

If you REALLY want to test them. Image the drive, use one defrag app. Restore the image, use another defrag app. Restore the image again, use a third defrag app. Rinse. Repeat.

Then and ONLY then can you make any comparisons as to how good one program is over another or how much faster one is than another.

Gary

 

nah, too tedious...it's all seat of the pants here

 

o&o is my pick. super fast has multiple options including a boot time defrag and you can align files pretty much however you can imagine. i love o&o, ive used dk, pd, and just about every other one out there

 

Yes, I trialed o&o and perfectdisk 8. They were both excellent. Like you said, o&o was faster than Perfectdisk. If I buy a defragger, I believe that will be it.

 

haha. easy, there mister all caps. i believe i specifically said a "from the hip" test. meaning inaccurate. it's GOING to be ALRIGHT.

 

If you have only 2% free space, then defragging is going to take hours, regardless of the defragmenter you use. I am amazed that any defragger was able to do anything at all with only 2% free space. Otherwise diskeeper is one of the fastest defraggers on the market.

The speed with which a defragger can finish it's job depends on the free space available, the degree of file fragmentation (very important!), the speed of the HDD, and the defragger's working algorithms.

In the rare cases that I was running out of space on a drive, I used to move some file over to another drive to make space, defrag the original drive and then move the files over. It was much much faster than waiting for a defrag to finish on a choked drive.

 

Ok mister "I can't find the shift key".

That is exactly the point, it's not a "test" at all. It might be considered an observation or an opinion but to label it in any way as a test, even a "from the hip test" (whatever the hell that is), is misleading. And I am not singling YOU out in that observation. This thread is full of wild ass claims about how one defrag is better, faster, stronger than another and yet not a single claim is backed up by any facts.

Gary

 

Really? From my point of view these so called "wild ass" are merely talking about their own experience and preferred defrag software, I don't think they are exactly making "claims".

I like vista's own defrag and this is what I use, so now I'm supposed to back it up with facts?

Regarding to 000111's test, I think he was just having a laugh, got to give him credit for making the effort in the first place. I doubt anyone actually took him seriously though.

 

man. you're serious? really? if you're so offended by the lack of facts, why don't you provide some? i think the metaphor from the hip is clear to anyone who has the most rudimentary grasp of the english language. misleading? i think not. informative? maybe not, but nothing worth flaming over. also notice i called for some facts (#10) in a previous post. i think we agree- we both want some facts on the situation.

 

Sorry! You are right, this particular thread isn't really making the "mine is faster than yours" claims that tend to permeate many of the other defrag threads here. I should have gone back and re-read the entire thread before I went off. Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa. I am just so tired of seeing all the truly wild ass claims presented as reality elsewhere in the other threads that I jumped on this thread.

000111, we're good. You are right, we BOTH want to see some folks actually back up their claims. I did do such a comparison of two defrags in the main "tweaks" thread. I did so to get to the bottom of what the "TuneXP" bootfiles tweak actually did. TuneXp uncovered

Gary

 

After just 2 days of normal use and installing 2 programs (adobe reader and office 2007) I went from 42.9 GB of space back down to 32.3 GB... freaking Vista.... what the crap now?

Maybe I need to dive in deeper and delete some other files I don't need. I thought removing windows.old would take of a lot of it but after poking around I found some files that should have been deleted but weren't. Luckily though I was able to find the old setup file for microsoft money '06 (which I thought was in windows.old) and reinstall it.

All this is kinda screwy now....