Anyone know why the offline boot time defragmenter analyzes but does not defragment in Windows 2000 SP4, but appears to work in Windows XP Home Edition SP2? (Perfect Disk offline boot time defragmenter works in both OSs on a real Windows PC.) Has anyone seen this issue?
I did some further testing. Windows XP only does analysis, but does not perform boot time defragmentation.
I used Treo 650 in camcorder mode to capture the message: "PerfectDisk could not lock drive C:\ for exclusive access"
So how do Windows pagesys, etc. files get defragmented? Over time, not being able to defrag these files will destroy performance.
See http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/FileAndDisk/PageDefrag.mspx - Mark wrote a pagefile defragger (also defragments the registry and other exclusively locked files at boot-time). Winternals also made a completely offline defragmenter - in lieu of that, you could just as easily run Windows PE under VMware and defragment the volume (which will defragment everything).
Thanks for the PageDefrag info. PageDefrag did defrag the pagesys file. As the name would suggest, PageDefrag did not defrag the directory information. Is there anyway to defrag the directory information?
Boot under Windows PE (look at the Windows AIK on Microsoft.com if you aren't familiar) and defrag - you'll have total control over the disk (you could even delete the pagefile and defrag around it, if you want - Windows will recreate it).