Defrag Dementia

I have a serious issue here.

It seems that everytime I defrag my win xp box, certain programs, mostly always games, go batshit about it, and cannot "locate themselves".

Wtf is up with that?

I defragged earlier, and had to reinstall gw.
this happened to baldurs gate 2 also.

any sort of science to avoiding this madness? Is the registry being rearranged during defragmentation?

jeebus...

Are you defragmenting with the Windows Defragger or a third party piece of software?

Norton Speedisk, latest version

Hmm, I have never used this, so I don't know about it giving errors like that. You do let it finish before doing anything, right?

If you want, you could try a different defragger. O&O Software has a free demo of their excellent program. You can find it on their site.

It's my understanding that defrag isn't really necessary in the post xp world. I've read some articles that say the benefits of it are very minimal.

I would recommend just not doing it. If you have to, then try zipping up the entire game folder first, run defrag and if the game doesn't work then delete the game folder and unzip the file and see if that does it.

That's what they want you to believe, but it is not true in a lot of cases. I myself test games for small private developers, so I am constantly downloading, installing, and uninstalling things. I rack my fragmentation percentage up very high very quickly. (For instance, I had my hard drive 96% fragmented because I got lazy.)

If you tend to do a lot of work on your computer that would cause fragmenting, I would recommend defragging at least once every two months. It's noticeable when you get the percentage up there.

Run chkdisk, this sounds like a drive failure to me. Speed Disk would certainly not do that, I have used it before and never has it given me any sort of trouble of that nature.

Depending on the age of the drive and how it was treated it may very well be the first signes of a drive failure though. If you notice more failures like programs crashing, BSOD or the likes it could be a range of problems, but the fact that programs appeared to be missing or non-functional after a Defrage seems to imply the drive itself. Defragmenting a drive, while a good thing, is often more intensive an operation the bursting for read and write activites as defragmenting involves sustained reading and writing for large periods of time to move large and small files into more optimized locations for access.

Anyone else here is welcome to combat the statment above if you feel that this is in error.

I posted this entire thread with my head up my ass. I apologize.

I have been building computers since 1993. I have all operating systems. I code in several languages. I know what the hell I am doing.

My question was, does defragmenting a drive affect the registry, but my post was all over that main line of thought. For that, I apologize. I simply have only had this happen with Guild Wars and Baldurs Gate 2.

I do not use the windows defrag, as it causes data loss.

As for the post-xp world not needed defrag, you were lied to. Files fragment over time, causing access delays and outright crashes.

In fact, a good defrag might fix several other people's GW issues. LMAO.

I fixed the problem. The root of it is this:

When you defragment your drive, there is a value written for the registry. Sometimes, just sometimes, this rewrite screws over something important, be it a DLL or OCX etc. This time it was a file guild wars uses to initialize itself. I defragged the drive a second time, AFTER uninstalling the game (manually, by removing all registry keys and files). Reinstalled it, and it works fine, and my drive is faster now :-)

As for all the disk failure stuff, no. My hard disk is 5 days old. It is a terabyte drive, and it completely error free, both on the disc surface and on clusters.

I appreciate the attempts to help. Research helped the most in the end...

Hmmm, a 5 day old hard drive needing defragged already? That sounds kind of odd if you ask me. You must really install and uninstall programs at lightning speed if you needed to defrag a 5 day old drive. Unless of course it was a disk preloaded with all that "valuable" software that computer makers like to give us!

You got it

Also as I said I do a lot of programming, and other things which require data shifting around quite a bit. It seems to me that the entire phenomenon of defrag should be addressed in Longhorn. It literally makes no sense why this problem cannot be abated with some serious development innovations...