Slow defragmentation

[Mark Stephenson]

My defrag takes forever. It will run for 15 hours to
complete and then it seems to be no better and will run
immediately if it is started again. In fact the % free
space seems to get slightly smaller whilst I haven't
installed/downloaded anything else. Is there a way around
this? Is this normal? A few things to bear in mind: It is
only an 8 Gb HD (with 20% free space). It has not been
defraged for a long time due to operating problems and so
it probably is badly fragmented. I have 512Mb Ram but the
CPU is only a P3 450 Mhz. I have disk cleaned and
checkdisked - as scandisk keeps restarting time and time
again. Can anyone help?
Thanks
Mark

 

[Steve]

Did you try chkdsk?

 

[noone]

defrag under XP is very slow. 15 hours does seem a tad bit, but I'm not
totally suprised. do an analyze and read the report; does it seem like
it's necessary? often the only thing frag'd is the IE cache.