Title: MessageI don't know of a good "aftermarket" defrag program, but I do know that Win98's defrag can be run at a c-prompt BEFORE Win loads, and that's how you can get around the problem you describe. That's the way I always did it, anyway. I believe you just type "defrag" at the c:.
-Brian H.
-----Original Message-----
From: J. R. Fox [mailto:jr_fox@xxxxxxxx]
Sent: Thursday, December 04, 2003 10:57 AM
To: xywrite@xxxxxxxx
Subject: OT: standalone defrag for W98 ?
There are a number of places where I could inquire about this, but since many of you use W98, I thought 'Why not take a shot here ?' I was recently called upon to do some maintenance on my nephew's computer, which is running W98. One of the things it needed was a good defrag run -- or two. The built-in utility for this does not
work: left to run for a couple hours, the process keeps bouncing between 0 % and 1 % complete, and that's as far as it gets. Anyone have a recommendation for a good, portable, standalone util. that can be run _from outside_, probably from an ERD bootup ? (That means Command Line, rather than GUI-based.) It should be appropriate for W98, with an emphasis on safety and reliability. (I recall the controversy over a past version or two of Norton SpeedDisk that fatally scrambled what it was supposed to be defragmenting.) I have used DiskKeeper on NT-4 and W2K (a "lite" version is the built-in defragger for W2K, though not so identified) with good results, but it has to be installed first and so is not external or portable.
Jordan