Defrag is running odd on one hard drive now. It runs up to about 10% done, then sticks. I go to the OPEN DETAILS window, and see a group of blue squares being erased and then written right back to same location again. Time after time. The boxes are located near the bottom of the DETAILS window. I have tried starting Defrag four times, and it always hangs at this point and does this same routine. I tried going to defrag via DOS, but get message that it can only be run within Windows. What is up? Wm.

Disable any program looging running in the background ie firewall or antivirus.

try doing the defrag in safe mode. In safe mode there are no applications running in the background and thus there is no interference in doing defragmentation. You will have to disable any power settings and also set your screen saver to none even in safe mode. To go into safe mode just restart your computer and start tapping F8 as soon as computer begins to start.

That activity at 10% is because defrag is rearranging your files for optimum (supposedly) performance. There is an option in defrag's settings to disable this.

It's possible that following the instructions at the link below will correct that problem. This error can occur if the Applog file in the hidden \Windows\Applog folder is damaged. To fix this: First make sure that you are able to see hidden files on your system. See Show all files to see how to show hidden files/folders. Select Start > Find, and then click Files or Folders In the Named box, type applog, select C: in the Look in box, click to select the Include sub folders check box, and then click Find Now Double-click the Applog folder to open it On the Edit menu, click Select all On the File menu, click Delete, and then click Yes when you are prompted to confirm the deletion. Tufenuf

The applog folder is used by defrag to determine how to rearrange the files.

It took quite a few different tries, but think I accomplished it. Defrag kept coming up with Disk error messages. I usually run both Scandisk and Defrag about every ten days to two weeks. However, yesterday I got the below message. "Scandisk has restarted 10 times because of Windows another program has been writing to this drive. Quitting some programs may enable Scandisk to finish sooner. Do you want to continue receiving this message?" I bleeped out the APPLOG file and then tried running Scandisk in Safe Mode. It quit about 20% the way through and said something was accessing the hard drive and it could not continue. I then tried running Scandisk at the blue box, DOS level. It would take about an hour, but reported no errors on disk. Then begin Windows 98 and try Defrag. Stopped at 10% with bad disk error message . I then tried running Scandisk at the blue box, DOS level a second time. It would take about an hour, but reported no errors on disk. Then begin Windows in Safe mode and try Defrag. Stopped at 50% with Explorer error message. Cannot continue. I then tried running Scandisk at the blue box, DOS level a third time. It would take about another hour, but reported no errors on disk. Then begin Windows at safe mode and try Defrag. Stopped at 79% with error message again of something on hard drive does not permit continuing. I then tried running Scandisk at the blue box, DOS level a fourth time. It would take about another hour, but reported no errors on disk. Then begin Windows at safe mode and try Defrag. The fourth time it went all the way through. I then went to Windows 98 and tried Defrag, and it took about 2 minutes and was done. Thanks for the suggestion of doing this in Safe Mode and at DOS level, but why such the difficult time here? The disk is far from being full. In hitting Ctl-Alt-Del I could not find any programs running other than the standard four. Wm.