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Doris Beckman - magoY2k NOSPAM-AT-NOSPAM netscape.net	Report As Irrelevant
Written: 5/2/2006 6:23 PM
On the issue of DEFRAG009 and the inability to run ScanDisk or Defrag on a Windows 98 machine with enough memory (256 MB) to do the job. The issue is simple. Neither the ScanDisk nor the Defrag Windows utilities that came along with Windows 98 were designed to handle by default hard drives larger than 8 GB. Even if cluster size was chosen correctly when the hard drive was formatted, the selection might not work at all, and formatting the hard drive again will certainly erase all the work acumulated in the meantime. To avoid this problem, try the following solutions: 1) Upgrade to Windows XP 2) Repartition the hard drive with a program such as Partition Magic. If the OS and the main programs are left on a partition of 8GB or less, then the utilities should be able to defragment the smaller sized partition (i.e., defragmenting small individual partitions of 8 GB instead of trying to defragment a large 80 GB hard drive with a single partition). The disadvantage here is that there is a limit to the number of partitions that the OS can handle on a large hard drive. 3) If upgrading to Windows XP is not an option (this would be the case when using older peripheral hardware for which the manufacturers never released Windows XP software drivers to make those older products compatible with Windows XP), then remove the current hard drive carefully and procure and install an (older) smaller hard drive (such as a Western Digital 10GB drive). Format this smaller sized drive as usual and load the OS on it. The other (bigger-sized) hard drive can still transfer its information from a hard drive kit case (such as those manufactured by ADS) by simple connection through the USB port. In order to do perform this last action, keep in mind that these hard drive kit cases where you simply install the older drive and connect it to a USB port will only work with USB 2.0. This means that this procedure will only be useful with Windows 98 Second Edition (Windows 98 First Edition could only handle USB 1.1). A simple way to defragment with this option is to simply transfer all of the files from one large directory to the bigger-sized hard drive, cutting it out from the hard-drive installed on the PC. Transferring the directory with all of its files back to the PC through the USB port will be done in a compact way providing en-route defragmentation.