The problem with asking for Technical help in a non-technical forum like this us that you get a lot of well-meaning people who know little bits and pieces but "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing".. and you will get lots of often conflicting suggestions in a random order without prioritising them.

For example the suggestion that the hard drive is some how 'on the way out' is easily countered by the technically savvy if one has done a couple of ScanDisks with Surface Scans and detected no problems. The Disk MAY be suspect, but if no problems are detected by a Surface Scan, the Trained knowledgeable experienced person will bypass that - even though it may be one of the first things tried.

Trying to detect exactly what is going on at a distance is not easy, taking into account the almost infinite possible combinations of OS and programs loaded on any particular hardware setup.


1) Seek and destroy viruses, trojans, malware, etc.

2) Check Disk with Surface Scan (probably should do this first, but who know what viruses will hook into and what damage they will do?) - a basic Check without surface scan should be done BEFORE attempting to defrag anyway. Theoretically, Defrag will usually detect a problem and fail with an error telling you to run checkdsk.

3) Anything that sends a write to the disk will interrupt the defrag and cause it to restart. This means any background process or program that writes anything to the disk - shut them down. Also another thread here mentions that the very process of moving the data around may cause rewriting of the linkage data in the FAT tables which can cause rewriting of directory (folder) info which may cause the directory to expand and rewrite to disk, causing a restart. This will EVENTUALLY sort itself out... Norton allows you to compact the directory sectors, the standard MS defrag does not. Some AV progs will detect you trying to run defrag and freak out - you may have to disable the AV utility - this is one reason for the suggestion of running in SAFE Mode, as some AVs are not normally enaged then. Some AV's monitor all reads and writes and can get their knickers in a knot.

4) Hardware interrupts such as modems, mice, etc MAY trigger a program that does a write (this may be an entry to a log file - if you have Spyware running, this could be what is happening), this will cause a restart of defrag. Shut them down or don't fiddle with them.

5) The defrag under SAFE Mode may help because many services are not started - you MAY need to perform this multiple times to 'get the disk sorted properly' - MS wired into the standard defrag a cute thing that sorts your files into the order that allows the most frequently run progs to be stored 'more efficiently according to its logic'. I have never needed to run defrag under SAFE Mode.

Incidentally, when defragging, the PC IS NOT AVAILABLE for ANYTHING you normally would run, but I did used to run MS Hearts on my old 95 slow box and no problems... :-)

6) Calm Down - when excited or upset, the mind tends not to work clearly. Give it a little break and don't panic.

Robin