Grondar

Every time I use Windows Disk Defragmenter/ScanDisk I get a message saying "Another application is writing to this disk... Yadda yadda"

Well, it IS my hard drive, so I would think that is completely natural.

Regardless, it won't let me complete the defrag, and I have decided to try and find another application to defrag my harddrive for me.

Do you have any recommendations? I have 2 GB of 60 free (damn you Kazaa Lite), so a defrag would certainly be beneficial to my hard drive.

Any help or recommendations would be greatly appreciated, as I haven't defragged my hard drive for over 3-5 months.

Thank you.

DonnChadh

If you're on 95/98 kill every running app except explorer and taskman before you defrag.

On 2k/XP I'm not sure if theres anything specific you can do (never had the problem on there)

As for defragmentation programs I use Diskeeper, which does it faster than the windows defragger.

[Edit: added Diskeeper link]

Grondar

I'm on Windows ME. I will try shutting down everything. Can I shut down TweakUI as well?

Thanks for the link to DiskKeeper, I will check that out, as it is probably exactly what I am looking for.

chodarama

you can close everything but explorer. you can leave systray too but it's not necessary.

Ratman

When this happened to me, I discovered that It would work if I turned off the screen saver, especially is doing SETI or folding.

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Binder

i remember having this problem when i was running win98. the solution was to turn off "auto-play" for the cd drive. for some reason when it is turned on it checks the cd on a very regular basis and accesses the hd, causing the same error message you are getting.