Since late this summer when I lost my Windows 98 os, I have not defragged. Today, I tried to and it starts up, goes to 1% and back to 0% and stops. When I check "details" I there is nothing but a white screen...no little cells. I am US Robotics 56K voice win. The Primary IDE controller is the only thing which I can find a problem and I think I disabled that so I could hook up my cd burner. Why does defragmenting stop at 1% and never go again?

Probably, you have some software running in the background that is interfering. Try completely exiting out to a DOS prompt and run defrag from a command line. Also, you can try booting Windows into safe mode and then try running defrag.

There may be errors on your disk that prevent defrag. Did you try running SCANDISK before DEFRAG ?

you mentioned win 98. if you are running win 98, defrag can't be ran rom dos. as Preston mentioned, you are better off running win 98 in safe mode, run scandisk and then derag (no screensavers or any apps that write to disk). if that doesn't work, try getting norton system works and "optimize" (defrag) your disk. norton's version of defrag is better than microsoft's.