[Defraggler extremely slow]

If you have bad tracks or cylinders on your HDD, nowadays it is best to just bin it because they cost UKP60 or less. You need to buy or borrow a USB/Firewire external disc to transfer your data, using UBCD. You can combine those with a "USB caddy" so that you can transfer an external disc to internal. If you have no money and can borrow an external disc, you could re-partition to avoid bad cylinders, but failing discs usually continue to fail and more bad cylinders will appear before long.

Fat32 is dreadfully unreliable. A single bit wrong in the boot sector can ruin the whole thing completely by making the next program overwrite the wrong FAT area. NTFS is only a bit better. The Linux Ext2 (or Ext3) system is far better. You can't boot Windows in Ext2, but there is a freeware "Ext2IFS" driver so that you can use it for a second partition with WinXP/Vista, to hold your big, valuable data. It doesn't suffer from fragmentation (hardly) at all. Unless you have a little Linux bootable partition as well, you can create and maintain it with a Linux CD system such as "Knoppix".

 

Thank you MikeYates for your indepth reply. What program should I use to transfer my data, and can I use DVD media formated for Data with Nero to back up to?

Mike in TN

[Defraggler extremely slow]

I have a 120 GB HD, running win xp pro. One partition FAT 32. I ran defraggler 3 days ago, but after hours of staying at 34% defraged I stopped it . Now I can't boot up my computer even in safe mode. It won't boot up using the last good configuation. I did a fixmbr and fixboot with my winxp cd, and it still would not boot. I then used UBCD4 Windows.

I used a program called TestDisk (www.cgsecurity.org). It showed the MBR and Boot sectors needed to be fixed....so I did that. I can view my files in the root directory, but on deepere analyzing of each cylinder, there is a problem with the last 3 cylinders. I still can't boot up normally to recover my data......Any help or sugestions would be appreciated.

Mike in TN