best approach for a very fragmented disk?

[paracas]

Hello,
I have what appears to be a very fragmented disk - see screenshot attached:from the Mydefrag graphic display I can see some files have up to 240,000 fragments !  - and would appreciate your advice on the best approach to use.

I'm trying to run the Daily System Disk script, as I suspect the Monthly System script will take several days, and I only have 30 hours downtime on this computer a week ( its an old appserver on a website, running Windows 2000 Server SP4).
However even the Analysis phase takes 12+ hours.

The first time I ran the Daily System Disk script it crashed after about 14 hours  with a "The computer is too busy (too many timeouts). Forcing a crash for debugging purposes." - it appeared to have finished the analysis phase and was 1% into a subsequent action (FastFill?)

Mydefrag.exe (v4.3.1) takes 50% CPU and 1GB RAM - I assume this is normal ?
Does slow performance simply indicate a very badly fragmented disk, or should I do a chkdisk/surface scan first to to make sure there are no bad blocks etc on this disk?
I should also mention that IIS was still running on this server while Mydefrag was running, so there may have been two logfiles being updated during this time.. is it best to prevent all other disk access while defrag is running?
Thanks for any tips you can offer..
regards
Robin
London, UK

[Darlis]

Your disk is not only heavily fragmented but also very full. You should try to get more free space first, before attempting to defrag the disk, otherwise it will take several days...

You don't have to shut down the server to defragment the files. Take a look at the ProcessPriority and Slowdown settings to reduce load of MyDefrag while the server is online.

[jonib]

When a disk is very fragmented I use Contig (Free from Microsoft) to reduce the fragmentation and then run MyDefrag to optimize. Contig is a "dumb" defragger it defragments files one at a time and tends to be more efficient on a very fragmented disk.

Of course the more free space you have the better MyDefrag and Contig works.

jonib

[paracas]

Thanks for the tips guys.
The disk shows as 9.3GB free out of 33GB total so I thought that was enough free space to start defrag, but perhaps all the free space is in teeny bits so it cant get going properly on it.

I had started on this task a couple of weeks back with a tool called PowerDefragmenter which seems to be a GUI front-end for Contig.exe, but got frustrated with how slow it was and so came to MyDefrag instead.
so I shall free up some space and use that contig tool for a bit , before returning to Mydefrag eventually..
cheers, Robin

[jonib]

The disk shows as 9.3GB free out of 33GB total so I thought that was enough free space to start defrag, but perhaps all the free space is in teeny bits so it cant get going properly on it.

When the free space is fragmented moving data to it is extremely slow, you could test the Consolidate Free Space MyDefrag script, might be more effective then Contig.

jonib

[BloodySword]

The scripts you should run in the given order is:

- ConsolidateFreeSpace - makes a forced fill, will fragment more data but the free space will be at the end of the disk

- System Disk Monthly - Optimizes your disk and will defragment everything.

[ff_mfg]

Best approach time-wise here would be to move most data to another volume, defragment the rest and move files back. Obviously it requires some downtime, but overall it would be a number of magnitude(s) times faster.

[Steve]

I had a similar situation as yours, what I did was run "Consolidate free space" then defragment. Repeat as necessary.