DiskMap problem

[Paul B.]

On a WinXP desktop, I'm trying to clean the drive as much as possible, and have tried several things in defraggler, including full defrag, defrag freespace with or without permitting defragmentation (really not sure what that's about, but...). I also manually set the page file to a large fixed number., and then used sysinternals page defrag to defrag the page flie (it took three fragments and made them two).

 

So now I'm looking at defraggler's diskmap after a ful defragmentation, and while it says the only file in pieces is pagesys, and the disk's reported 7% fragmentation level roughly corresponds to that (2.3G / 38.5G in use = 6%), the diskmap is riddled with red squares. And a couple of tries now have not gotten rid of them. So I'm not sure what's going on here. I'll attach a screen grab.

[Aethec]

Is the fragmented file in C:\System Volume Information\ with a very long name in hexadecimal characters ?

[Paul B.]

No, it's pagesys - not sure I spelled that correctly - the page file, which I believe is in the root folder. I hard-set it to 2.4G, and Defraggler is reporting it to be 2.3, which I guess is close enough.

And now I've just rechecked after a morning boot, and the problem is much better. Though disk fragmentation is still at 7%, there are now 254 fragmented files, comprised of 1854 fragments - much more than before - yet the diskmap has cleaned itself up immensely. I have no idea why that would happen. I'm attaching another screen shot.

[Stokesson]

No, it's pagesys - not sure I spelled that correctly - the page file, which I believe is in the root folder. I hard-set it to 2.4G, and Defraggler is reporting it to be 2.3, which I guess is close enough.

And now I've just rechecked after a morning boot, and the problem is much better. Though disk fragmentation is still at 7%, there are now 254 fragmented files, comprised of 1854 fragments - much more than before - yet the diskmap has cleaned itself up immensely. I have no idea why that would happen. I'm attaching another screen shot.

 

I have just updated to the latest version 1.18.185 and noticed that at the end of defragging the disk map is BOGUS. Just Analyse again and the true status is revealed, all the Red disappears!! This is one of two bugs I have noticed so far. I am running on Windows 7 and XP, the XP defrag routine also has this bug where an analyse step is required to get a correct picture. The Windows 7 program doesn't even show a map.

[Aethec]

• Hit Windows key + Pause/Break key on your keyboard.
• Choose "Advanced system settings"
• Click the button in the "Performance" category
• In the "Advanced" tab, click the "Change" button
• Select "No paging file"
• Click the "Set" button, and click OK
• Reboot
• Go back to the dialog you just quit, and chose "Custom size"
• For both the "Initial size" and "Maximum size", type 2560
  
• Click the "Set" button, and click OK
• Reboot

That should "defrag" the pagefile. I recomment 2560 because it is 10*2^8 - i.e. a computer-friendly size near the one you currently have.

[Paul B.]

Thanks, Aethec. I set PageDefrag to run at each boot, and on the second try it did completely defrage pagefile.sys. I'm pretty optimized now, but I'll definitely hold on to this trick.

 

p.