Hi. I installed Defraggler a couple of days ago to add to a maintenance clean up for a friends pc. This pc is a few years old and I dont think any maintenance had been preformed. I did all the cleaning up and deleting of stuff and updating, then finished off with a defrag, with default settings. Before starting, Windows said there was 449 Gb free on the terabyte drive. After first defrag drive has 341 Gb free! Map still shows fragments so I run it again. Now there is 629 Gb free!! Map still shows fragments, run again. Currently at 60% with 11 hours to go but now showing 623 Gb free!!! Where has 180Gb of data gone? Im a little concerned as its not my pc.
Any ideas? Thanks
I have heard about analogous situation. I don't know what's exactly reason. Propably some of data could be damaged or be shown as 0 byte size. I would recommend to give that drive to specialist who will recovery disk (If it is possible), because it could be problem with rewriting mtf.
Try not to do on your own!*
*If you want to do it on your own You should make safety disk image (copy whole disk with mbr and mft sectors ).
Thats not good news! Have done a full scan disc with no issues. I had a quick look at random files under various users and nothing Ive found is corrupt. I will let my friend use the pc for a while and see if any issues arise.
Hi matty,
I don't think there are any issues and unless your friend has problems it shouldn't be necessary to take it to any specialist.
Don't You think Hazelnut that "spare" space isn't result of any kind of issue?
Waiting for matty to post back with more infor such as what is happening now, what operating system it is using, and whether it could be the volume shadow copies/restore points that are causing the issue.
Hazelnut is right. Without knowing all the details, you're guessing as to what is the cause. What percentage of that 1TB drive was allocated to system restore points? 5%? 10%? 20%? Were the old restore points ever deleted? Was a Windows Update cleanup ever performed? Was there a Windows.old file still in existence on the drive after a system upgrade? And just how bad was the initial disk fragmentation?
You'd be surprised at just how much disk space is wasted if you allow disk fragmentation to go unchecked for an extended period of time. I was in a situation similar to matty_hunt recently. I worked on a Toshiba laptop that had been neglected for over two years. To make a long story short, I started with 58GB of disk space being used and removed about 6GB of junk files from the drive. Then multiple passes using Defraggler (5 or 6 I think) pared the remaining 52GB down to just 32GB. This tells me about 40% of that 52GB was just empty space intermingled with 32Gb of actual data. Now apply that same percentage to a badly fragmented drive having 500GB of space being used out of 1TB total. The results would be about 200GB of empty space reclaimed by defragmenting.