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I have a 900GB HDD that had around 120GB free. The disk was showing 55% fragmented so I ran a defrag.

The defragmentation took a long time and I left it running over the weekend, but unfortunately the process was interrupted. Now the disk is showing as 79% fragmented and it's completely full. I ran defrag again and it finished quickly (5 - 10 minutes) but the disk remained full and the fragmentation ratio remained at 79%.

FWIW, before running the defragger, I noticed that the disk was almost full (over 750GB) but adding up everything (by selecting everything on the drive and Alt+Enter) on the drive gave me a much lower number (around 300GB). Is it possible that there is some hidden data, a backup, or a snapshot that's taking up all the free space? Maybe another system snapshot was created when I ran the defragger, causing the disk to fill up?

I suspect that the computer was shutdown abruptly and that left some temporary files created by the defragger on the disk. Is there any way to recover from this? By recover I mean reclaim my free space and defrag the disk?

Giacomo1968
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ventsyv
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2 Answers2

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From your question I guess you used the Windows system defragger. To my knowledge, this system function does not move empty chunks. Try using a better defragmentation tool like Defraggler by CCleaner. It is free and even has a portable version. I've had good results with Defraggler so far, but, admittedly, have not had such high fragmentations, yet.

Do you have your pagefile on your fragmented HDD? If you have another HDD or partition, you could try moving your pagefile to another drive to get more space before you run defragmentation. You can move it back to the current drive after it has been properly defragmented

A disk tree mapper was mentioned in the comments to search for large files. WinDirStat (also free and portable) does exactly that. It indexes all the files in your specified directory and sorts them by size, so you can see what eats up most of your space.

Ian
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Turns out Windows search was filling up the disk. It doesn't seem that the defragger did anything bad. I'll run another defrag over the weekend.

ventsyv
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