Why won't my disk defragmenter run?

Question

My computer shows that it only has 6% free space in the C Drive, which it says it need like 12 or 15% to run the disk defragmenter. I've went in under add/remove programs and deleted all but the basics, deleted temporary internet files, and run the disk cleanup, but it still shows that I have that small amount of free space. What could be causing this, and how can I fix it?

Answer 1

This program helps narrow down where your memory is going.

http://sourceforge.net/project/downloadi...

Answer 2

I'm afraid if your hard drive is full and you have deleted everything you can the only thing to do is buy a bigger hard drive.

Answer 3

Right Click on My Computer and then choose Properties.

Go to the System Restore tab and click settings. Win XP sets aside 14%  of your hard drive space for system restore...far more than needed.

Reset the slider to about 4-5% and then click apply (or OK) then restart your system. You should then be able to run Defrag

You can also try running Disk Defrag in safe mode

Answer 4

Have you emptied your recycle bin?

If you try everything and you still don't have enough room, you're going to have to take things off the drive.  You have two choices:

1) Move stuff to CDs or DVDs untill you have enough room.  ("Stuff" means data - don't move programs themselves.  Data is picture files, documents, spreadsheets, etc.)

2) Get a larger drive.  (Even good Terabyte drives aren't that expensive any more - that's 1,000 Gigabytes.)  Either move all your documents to the new drive, or clone the old drive to the new drive, and use the new one.  (You can use programs like Unix's dd to clone a drive - it's free, and not difficult to learn to use.)

BTW, you should never stuff a drive so full that you can't defrag it.  when it gets close it's time to get a larger drive.  Having almost no free space is one oi the causes of fragmentation.

Answer 5

It sounds like you have a lot of programs installed on your computer. I would go through the add/remove and uninstall any programs you may not be using anymore.

On the defrag question you can run a defrag from the command line and force it even though the space is under 12%. Follow the following steps.

Start Menu

Click on RUN then type CMD and hit enter.

This launches the Command prompt

At the cursor type - defrag -f

This will start the defrag and force it even with low disk space.

I still would highly recommend checking your installed programs for applications that you no longer use and uninstall them. Or possibly consider upgrading the Hard Drive that is in your computer.

Answer 6

You need to clean up some files.

Go to the windows file search and go to town finding large files.

Start out by searching these one at a time

.avi

.mpg

.mp3

.mov

.zip

.rar

(all your music movies and videos)

I would not do .exe

after you search those extensions you can sort the list by size and right click on the files and select delete on the ones you can do without .

If you have alot of music and videos you can easily get back 20 percent by deleting some stuff.  

Be carefull not to delete things that you are not sure what they are.