Percent fragmented stays high

First of all, the "percent disk fragmented" figure can be misleading, as it is low resolution. A much better figure is "Average fragments per file". If this is 1.02 or less, the disk is OK. There have been documented instances of disks with all files contiguous except the paging file, and "percent fragmented" over 50%!

Now, if "Average fragments" is much over 1.02 and the disk is not getting any improvement, there are five things to check:

1. If the disk has less than 20% free space, the disk performance will degrade noticeably, and Diskeeper will also start slowing down. If there's less than 10% free space, Diskeeper will get really slow, and may not be able to do any defragmenting. Large contiguous free spaces are needed to defragment large files. Do some housekeeping; clean out old files and garbage files, and archive anything you don't really need on the disk.
2. Any file which is open exclusively cannot be moved, which makes it harder to consolidate free space. This is especially true of large files which, when fragmented, can do a lot of blocking of free space, since each fragment may be getting in the way of Diskeeper. If at all possible, run Diskeeper at a time when you can close these files.
3. The paging file (or swapfile) is a large file which is always open and, since it grows and shrinks, tends to be very fragmented. If there is a paging file on the disk partition you are concerned with, check our FAQ on defragmenting the paging file .
4. A very large file, especially if badly fragmented, can prevent Diskeeper from consolidating the free space. Diskeeper 1.0x cannot do partial defragmentations; it must make a file completely contiguous, or leave it alone. You could have 500MB of free space, but no single piece as large as 10 MB, and you would not be able to defragment a 10MB file. Diskeeper 2.0 for Windows NT 4.0 can do partial defragmentations but under Windows NT 3.51, the only workaround is to move the huge file to another disk, run a few passes with Diskeeper, then move the file back.
5. Last, Diskeeper may not have the permissions needed to access all of the files. See the Technical Article " Permissions ".

With Diskeeper 2.0, the best way to handle slow defragmentation is to run it in the manual mode, maybe several times, to clean up the disk completely. It is then very easy for Diskeeper to maintain the disk using the "Set-It-and-Forget-It" mode.

If this FAQ helped, please let us know. If you didn't find the answer to your question here please e-mail

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