Richard B -

If your 160GB hard drive is fairly new, you may be able to download a "setup and diagnostics" program from the drive manufacturer's website that will do a much better job of nearly everything (for setting up, formatting, and usually for mirroring) than is provided in the general purpose stuff in any Windows system. Try looking under "support" or "downloads" at the mfr's site. These programs will generally look at what OS you're using and the drive type, and will only offer appropriate partitions/cluster setups.

It's unlikely that one of these will include defrag, and DEFRAG is slow on large FAT32 drives under Win98. Part if the problem is just the sheer size of newer drives, but with FAT32 to "FAT" sections can have a variable size. The "dwell" at the start of a defrag is because these tables have to be sorted out, and in Win98 they must be at the beginning of the drive.

Once that sorting is done, the defrag proceeds into the rest of the drive, but everytime it moves a file in a way that causes a change in the size of the FAT, it has to start over, and has to redo all of the drive up to where the change happened - before it can start on any new stuff higher up on the drive. (If you're mathematically inclined, think about sums over all n of 2ⁿ series - for n= number of files on your drive.)

The WinME defragger appears to leave a few clusters open above the FAT sections, so that complete "re-do from scratch" cycles are reduced, but they're not eliminated. The FAT32 tables can contain lots of information, some of which is optional when folders are created, and the defrag usually attempts to add the missing optionals, so the tables change size frequently during a defrag.

The problem pretty much goes away with the NTFS format, but of course Win98 can't use them.

John