A friend has a 10 gig hard drive and has to use ez-drive partition program to recognise the higher partition.He sucessfully defragged the drive several times.Has win98 installed. Now he gets an error when trying to defrag. The defrag program says "drive changed,restarting program" then "unable to defragment drive,check with help to resolve". I tried disabling all startup programs, including anti-virus, but still get the same message.Have run scan disk several times with no problems encountered.The statement "drive changed, restarting program", seems to indicate maybe an open program in the back-ground. But have disabled all running programs with same error.Any suggestions? Will be greatly appreciated!

Run defrag.exe from a dos prompt only. Windows is writing to the disk causing restarts. Same with scandisk.

I have tried the suggestion given above and run "defrag.exe" from the dos prompt and this still does not get the hard drive to defrag. How do I stop the windows from writing to the disk so I can run my McAfee defrag program or the one that comes with windows? Why isn't everyone else on the planet having this same problem? Thanks for the help.

I am having a similar problem with no reasonable results. I have a Sony Vaio PCG-z600re with Windows 98. The hard drive is partitioned into c: and d: drives. The d: drive will defragment using the windows utility. The c: drive won't. I've turned off all programs (except explorer), tried defragging from dos (does not work -- it just sends me back to the windows utility), tried defragging using the windows 95 utility (does not work), and tried using the old dos "cotig" command (it won't work -- it is not suitable for fat drives). I have, of course, run the "thorough" scandisk utility "n" times on the c: drive before defragging. Scandisk indicates no problems and yet defrag still stalls. Any bright ideas? Thanks

I have the similar problem where my hard drive won't run the defrag program with the same reason of "drive changed, restarting program." and it also won't run under the dos command. It all started when I installed win 98 plus into my computer, is that what happened with everybody else? any at all answers please tell me Thanks

I have had the same problem with my Sony F series, i cant defrag anymore eversince reinstalling Win98. Ive run scan disk plenty of times with no probs, it is when i run defrag it goes bonkers. Im gonna try and search out a solution or get in touch with sony...if i have any luck ill post here. If anyone else has sorted the problem...please let me know. Thanks

Similar problems to above. Defrag has always worked on my machine. Recently, have experienced DEFRAG004 error; "unable defrag due errors..etc". Only change to my machine is Nortons Internet Guard Dog installed. Any suggestions?