I just bought a Seagate ST750LX003 Momentus XT 750 GB as the new primary drive for my gaming laptop, and I'm wondering how to defrag them, and whether it is safe. I wanted the best of both worlds (space and speed) so I went for the middle ground. What is the difference between a regular HDD, SSHD, and a SSD? Do I just let Windows perform its' normal defrag routine as I normally would, or do I need to download some kind of proprietary software from Seagate that will do it? I like to use 3rd party software (UltimateDefrag) for my defrag operations, is all. And how much can I fill it up before it starts to slow down? I ask because I've heard that you cant fill an SSD up past around 50 to 60% or so before it slowly starts to degrade, since it needs room to perform its' TRIM (defrag) operations. Is this also true of SSHDs?
I tried to upgrade to windows 8 through the store and if failed horribly, the pc refused to boot a an error code I that don't remember so I decided to wipe everything and install Windows 8.1 from a usb drive. Everything was fine for the past week and a half until 2 days ago when the disk defragmentation tool decided to stop working, I ran the tool many times after installing 8.1 and it has always worked but now I get a 0x80070057 error which should mean that the size of my partition is wrong. I did a chkdsk /r /f that took 2 hours to complete and it didn't find any errors and I also ran a sfc /scannow with no luck.
Here is a screenshot
After spending some time googling for the issue I found out that there are many Windows 8.1 users with the same issue and on the microsoft forums no one seems to be able to fix this. From what I understand this seems to be related to the size values of the partition which according to the defragger are wrong but the tool was working before and I didn't edit the partition in any way.
My Disk Defragmenter that came with the system will not open. When I try to open it, a CMD windows appears for 1 second and disappears. I have tried opening it in all ways.
I have tried:
Safe Mode Sfc /Scannow Chkdsk Anti Malware scans
I need something like the answer for this question, only a way to do it in Windows 8. His instructions only work on Windows 7.
im using Windows 8 64bit and every time I try to defrag or optimize it it goes to pass 2.92% and just hangs there for hours before I just give up. also anylize takes forever to complete
So I tried to open defrag today for the first time with using Windows 8 and when I click on the application the command prompt opens and closes in about two seconds and then nothing happens.
I Defraged my comp to Optimize. After defrag, my mouse and keyboard no longer worked. I tried restarting, unpluging and switching to a wired mouse and keyboard. I can't get the comp to recognize them. I also switched between back and front ports.
My set up has 2 x 650 GB WD Black hard drives and a Samsung 840 (non pro) for the boot drive.
I have run the latest Samsung Magician, however the BIG problem is that it has stopped the windows 8 Defrag program.
I reinstalled Win 8 and all was OK, (now for the bit about me being thick -- ) I thought I would try the old version of Samsung Magician, and Bu**er me if has not only done the same thing again, turned off defrag and optimize, I am just unable to open defrag in order to defrag my WD drives.
I do not really want to reinstall Windows 8 again unless I have to, so how to switch defrag bag on again.
It seems that Windows 8.1 Pro's scheduled defrag is consolidating free space, which is taking forever on one of my 2 TB data drives, which has about 300 GB free space. I stopped it at about 9%, and dfrgui immediately showed it as "OK (0% fragmented)". Clicking its Optimize button resulted in the defrag phase completing almost immediately, but then it was back to consolidating free space, starting at 5% this time. According to Task Manager, it's read/writing about 40 MB/sec, and the Active Time is over 90%. I really don't want this to go on for hours and hours and potentially repeat itself during future scheduled scans. Is it possible to alter this behavior, or should I just disable the weekly defrag task?
I have legal retail keys for W8 Pro and W8 WMC, however now I use W8 Enterprise (KMS, because Win2Go).
I have downloaded two v8-1 Upgrade Assistants (1st asks for key, 2nd starts compatibility test). When I compare those two EXEs binaries in TCommander 1st MS calls "LATE" version 2nd MS calls "MAIN" version.
Of course on Enterprise there is no Windows Store Upgrade option.
MAIN version:
[URL]
LATE version:
[URL]
However the system drive is Truecrypted, so my question is:
When will I start upgrade via one of those assistants (BTW: which one?) inside W8 Enterprise, will update keep loaded TrueCrypt driver? (So in other words, will I survive system restart?)
Or do these Upgrade Assistants building of installation boot drive only? In that case I had to do temporary decrypt...
My computer freezes when I right click on Defrag from the search menu. When trying to open it, nothing happens. I am able to get to defrag from the control panel.
I have a laptop that has an SSD with Win 8.1 + programs, and an HDD for projects. They are both formatted GPT. When I launch Macrium, for some reason my SSD is now GPT 1 and the second drive is now GPT 2. This is confusing because I'm used to imaging the top line of partitions which is usually my OS. Now that the GPT numbers are reversed, I have to be careful when doing my backups. How to change this assignment so that the SSD will be GPT1 again?
I recently upgraded to windows 8 from windows 7. No problem in doing so but one or two minor niggles which I have got sorted I hope.
Now then, my "D" drive which was or still has as far as I know got the factory settings on it which I guess is the restore points and things like that. It is 13.5GB and has only 2.33GB free on top of the first amount.
What I would like to know is can I format that drive and use it for windows 8 restore or has that been done by 8 when I upgraded to it. With only just over 2gb left there is not much room for restore points.
I have 2 hard drives in my computer, my main Windows 8 C:, and a win7/game/data drive, the second of which is failing. reports show it is failing a smart short test, and although it has been running fine for months, i figured i would replace it with my tax return.
My question: If i create a system image of C: and D:, would it be possible to just restore the D: portion of the image, or do I have to restore both, then delete the second C: on the new drive? i do not have the resources or courage to test this on my system now because I am not sure what this reformat, and with my luck, the drive would die during the restore.
I recently bought a Dell Windows 8 desktop. I upgraded the desktop to Windows 8.1. I want to create a recovery drive using a DVD rather than a flash drive. (I understand Microsoft wants you to create recovery onto a flash drive rather than a DVD. Not sure why.)
I found several places on the net which discuss just how create recover onto a DVD. They suggest that I do a search on "Windows 7 file" and this will display an option to click on "Windows 7 File Recovery" ... and that will lead me through the steps to create my recovery onto a DVD.
Problem is "Windows 7 File" is not found. How do I get this onto my Windows 8.1 system?
if you've made a recovery image backup of Windows 8.1, can you use a Windows 8 recovery USB drive to restore it, or do you need to make a specific Windows 8.1 one?
My 60 GB C: drive ran out of room. The only thing installed on it is Windows 8 and whatever pre-installed programs came with my computer. I ran WinDirStat (WinDirStat - Windows Directory Statistics), a directory statistic tool and found two very large folders: C:/Windows is 22.2 GB and C:/ProgramData/Microsoft is 17.2 GB. This doesn't seem right. Can I free up room in these or are they both necessary? I read that windows 8 should take up around 20 GB, not 40 so how might I got about freeing up some space?
Also, I updated from Windows 7 about two months ago.
I recently went to command prompt on my main pc and did : chkdsk /f /r on my main computer.
It said "the current thing is in use, would you like to run check disk on startup? (Y/N) I put Y, then restarted my computer. Then it was stuck on 27% for about an hour, so I got worried and restarted my computer about two or three more times. it says "scanning and repairing drive (C 27% complete)" and none of the times it would load regular windows so I decided to just stick with it.
It's been over 3 hours, and it's still stuck on 27%. How can I disable it or how long will it take?
system info HP desktop 12gb ram 2 tb hard drive windows 8
Also I tried f8 and it just brings me back to system restore, and when I tried that it just gave me a black screen, so i'm just letting my PC sit and do the C: repair
I have this identical problem mentioned here : Scanning and repairing volume (?Volume...) on startup
I think it has something to do with my deleting the 'system reserved' 350mb partition when I reinstalled Windows 8. I don't want it showing in My Computer and when I go into Disk Management and give it a drive letter, this message goes away on boot. But, since I can't merge this very small partition with any other drive, I'm not sure how to not show this drive and not get the scanning message on boot up.
In few days I will have my new computer with Windows 8.1, and I wonder what solution would be the best for easy backing up and restoring of system drive in the new machine. For last 5 years I've been using Acronis to create an image of entire partition c: , with windows and all my crucial software, and if only my system felt slow or there was too many stuff installed, I simply restored it from this image (of course app data was moved to d:, so that no settings of my programs were replaced). From time to time I was making new image, so that it was always ready to work 'out of the box' with all the updates etc..
Any different solution to accomplish the same as I don't want to move app data to d: any more because I'll have ssd drive for my system, and I would prefer to have it all in one partition, so my solution will no longer be effective. Is there any native Windows 8 solution for system backup and is it any good? Or maybe I could simply backup "windows" and "program files" folders, and restore just them. Would it be as effective as restoring entire partition?
I'm looking to create a system image of Windows, but my external hard drive already has a bunch of files on the drive. There is plenty of space for the backup, but I'm worried if Windows will format the drive.
I have some questions regarding the new Chkdsk in Windows 8 (I'm using Windows 8.1 Pro 64bit).
note that Windows 8's Chkdsk has changed considerably since the previous Windows versions; so if you know about the Chkdsk in Windows 7 or previous Windows versions, this could not apply to the Chkdsk in Windows 8.
I also point out that I'm talking about the GUI version, accessible from the drive's properties Window.
My main questions are: when Chkdsk has finished scanning, and the results window appears, can I at once proceed with the following, or should I wait some time:
1) In case of an external USB drive, disconnect the hard drive (with "safely remove hardware", even if the cache is turned off), and turn it off.
2) In case of an internal drive (HDD or SSD), reboot Windows, or turn off the computer.
My worry is that if I would disconnect a USB drive, or reboot or turn off the PC in case of an internal drive, before the Chkdsk-related activity is finished, then the file-system of the disk in question could get damaged.
My doubts come from the following facts:
- I have been told that when the Chkdsk results window appears, this means that Chkdsk has finished working with that drive; but I have noticed that some short drive activity is happening some seconds (about 6) after the results window appears (should be a write activity, not sure if also read activity). I noticed this by observing the LED on my USB drives, and also by monitoring the drives in question with Windows 8's new Taskmanager.
- In case of disconnecting USB drives, I have been told that I can be sure that if some drive activity is happening, then the "safely remove hardware" feature won't have effect, and would warn me that there is disk access going on; but I have tried to select "safely remove hardware" while Chkdsk was in the middle of a scan, and the result was that Chkdsk got interrupted (with an error messsage appearing probably from Chkdsk), and the USB hard drive got removed. Though this seems not to have caused any file-system errors (I did another Chkdsk scan later).
You may think that I just need to look at the drive's LED, or monitor the drive's activity with the new Taskmanager, and take note of after how much time the drive activity ceases. Then I would just need to wait so long before disconnecting the USB drive, or rebooting or turning off the PC.
My problem here is that I'm not sure if the new Taskmanager, or the drive's LED, are sensible enough to detect even the smallest disk access, which could get unnoticed. I'm not sure how much I should wait... seconds? Minutes? What do you think? Perhaps there's no need to wait at all?
I did some tests by disconnecting (with "safely remove hardware") a USB drive shortly after doing a Chkdsk on it. Then I did another Chkdsk after turning it on again. I didn't get any error message from Chkdsk. But I'm still worried that there could be an unfortunate moment, during which a disconnection (still with "safely remove hardware") could cause problems, perhaps because in that moment a write operation could be in process.
I think I have read that the new Chkdsk in Windows 8 uses VSS ("Shadow Copy") to check the drives while keeping them online. With this new Chkdsk, I think it is possible to continue using the drive while the scan is happening, even on the system drive.
I was thinking about this: is it possible that the short activity which I have noticed after Chkdsk's results window appears, comes from this Shadow Copy Service, which is "unmounting" (?) the shadow copy used by Chkdsk?
If this is true, is it important to let the "unmounting" task happen, or can I disconnect, reboot, or turn off before it starts? And what happens if I interrupt this "unmounting" task in the middle, while it is in process?
Does it make some sense to wait some time after doing a Chkdsk, or can I at once proceed to disconnect the USB drive, or reboot or turn off the PC (in case of internal drives)?
My windows 8 HP laptop keeps getting scanning and repairing drive D 100% complete and just stays there and nothing happens. And sometimes it goes on and it just becomes a black screen... My laptop was shut down for a few weeks and this happened and I need it again now... I got a new laptop which is why it stayed off but now i need it again. What should I do? I don't care if everything on it gets erased. I actually prefer to format it. Moreover, my f keys dont work nor does my escape button.