That should be pretty self explanatory surely? I've got an 80 GB drive on FAT32 and want to defrag it. About 40 GB of it is in use. How long would that take and would it be really worth it?

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Fire Pretty - Graz's Armoury - (That's my blog...)

The Soviet Bunker - (That's my forum...)

"Thou shalt not steal. (Because the government doesn't like competition!)"

How to keep an idiot busy: See below
How to keep an idiot busy: See above

on winxp, it shouldn't take too long. On win9x/me, that defragger is slow, so it may take up to 24 hrs.



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I have found that you can transform your character solely by the power of belief: as you believe yourself to be, so you shall become over time.

to defrag my half filled 40gb it takes 1 hour, so i'd guess 2-3 for you

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In soviet Russia, thread posts YOU!

It depends how fragmented it is.

Set up the defrag before you go to bed, let it run while you're asleep. It should be don't when you wake up in the morning.

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I'm not an actor. I just play one on TV.

eek fat32. Format it to NTFS while you're at it.

You can convert it without formatting, you know...

Command Prompt -> convert c: /fs:ntfs

Let 'er reboot, then let 'er do its magic.

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"The future is not determined by a throw of the dice, but is determined by the conscious decisions of you and me."
I am addicted to ellipses!!! AHHH!!! ...
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Hold on just one second... what does going from FAT32 - NTFS do? (I'm on WinXP by the way so that should cut time down...) Also, do I convert before or after defrag... and CM, you're telling me your method leaves ALL my data intact?

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Fire Pretty - Graz's Armoury - (That's my blog...)

The Soviet Bunker - (That's my forum...)

"Thou shalt not steal. (Because the government doesn't like competition!)"

How to keep an idiot busy: See below
How to keep an idiot busy: See above

[This message has been edited by Gee_4ce (edited August 17, 2004).]

[This message has been edited by Gee_4ce (edited August 17, 2004).]

Defrag times are highly dependant on your processor speed and amount of RAM.

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║ TheJkWhoSaysNi║ -----@% (Snail racing. ) .║
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║Warning: This post may contain traces of nut║
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Processor: P IV 2.4 GHz
RAM: 512 MB

So?

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Fire Pretty - Graz's Armoury - (That's my blog...)

The Soviet Bunker - (That's my forum...)

"Thou shalt not steal. (Because the government doesn't like competition!)"

How to keep an idiot busy: See below
How to keep an idiot busy: See above

It could have been already finished in these 2 hours

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"Music is the universal language and the
dialect we speak in is Hip Hop!" - King Solomon

Just defrag it. It certainly isnt a bad thing, who cares how long it takes, just go do something else. I have a 160gb, 60gb, and 80gb, of which I regularly defrag.

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ZGPC

Get diskeeper as it is far superior to the standard windows defragger.

I have used it for months and I would never go without it now.

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"She turned me into a newt!"
Pause
"Well I got better..."

If you convert to NTFS you'll lose all of your data, but windows will run better. Xp and 2000 were designed to run on an NTFS hard drive. You're only hurting your computer's speed by running on Fat32.

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Change is never a choice. You change, and you are who you have become. And there's not a damned thing you can do about it.

You will not lose your data by converting to NTFS.

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╔═════════════╦══════════════════╗
║ TheJkWhoSaysNi║ -----@% (Snail racing. ) .║
╠═════════════╩══════════════════╣
║Warning: This post may contain traces of nut║
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Right, I refuse to convert to NTFS until I get some hard evidence that it doesn't delete my data. I'm going to set the defrag running now and go eat my breakfast, then watch a movie - should be done by then!

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Fire Pretty - Graz's Armoury - (That's my blog...)

The Soviet Bunker - (That's my forum...)

"Thou shalt not steal. (Because the government doesn't like competition!)"

How to keep an idiot busy: See below
How to keep an idiot busy: See above

Converting from FAT32 to NTFS won't delete your files. I've done it a few times for a few different people and nothing horrible like loss of data has ever occured. So yeah, get converting.

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This post was proudly brought to you by KegZ™ - Now with 38% more Spam

So before I convert, what's this page banging on about?

http://aumha.org/win5/a/ntfscvt.php

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Fire Pretty - Graz's Armoury - (That's my blog...)

The Soviet Bunker - (That's my forum...)

"Thou shalt not steal. (Because the government doesn't like competition!)"

How to keep an idiot busy: See below
How to keep an idiot busy: See above

Despite that it won't delete your data, it still isn't a bad idea to run a backup first.

[Edit: Small cluster sizes save disk space but can slow down the hard drive, because it has more clusters to deal with for every file it's asked to load. Bigger clusters can increase speed, but also cause files to take up a slight more space.

Example:
We have a 1kb file here. With a 512byte cluster size, it fits perfectly into two clusters... but then whenever the file is loaded the drive has to load two clusters that might be lying in different places on the drive due to disk fragmentation.

With a 4kb cluster size, the file is always in one piece on one cluster.

Now let's increase the scale to a practical size:

We have a 5mb MP3 file. With a 512 byte cluster size, it uses 10240 clusters, all of which can be hiding anywhere on the disk (icky).

With a 4kb cluster size, it only has to look up 1280 clusters.

CM, other experts, etc... did I get it right? ]

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[This message has been edited by The_Mega_ZZTer (edited August 18, 2004).]