 Re: PerfectDisk
On Sat, 02 Sep 2006 11:46:31 -0400, John McGaw <nobody@nowh.ere>
wrote:
>> Does anyone have any experience with a product called PerfectDisk?
>Well, I use it regularly and have for a couple of different versions so
>I guess that I have "experience". It seems to do its job and to do it
>well enough that I haven't bothered to even look for any other
>defragmenters. It has certainly never done any damage to any of my
>drives and I've discovered that, even though they don't really document
>it well, that it very neatly recovers wasted reserved MFT space on
>drives when used in its offline mode.
That's good to hear because although I am evaluating it at present, I
may end up getting a license because it is the only thing that
*apparently* fixed a problem I have been having for a year since I
built my new machine. Nothing else worked, because *apparently*
nothing else attacked the source of the problem, namely corrupt NYFS
filesystem objects (pagefile, MFT, et al).
When I built this machine I put in 512 MB RAM. I then did an "In Place
Upgrade" (IPU) of my previous Win2K/SP4 install from another machine
with less RAM. I increased the pagefile to 1.5 GB, based on the
formula Microsoft recommends of 3 times RAM. For reasons I do not
understand, these filesystem objects, in particular the MFT, kept
getting corrupted. If the machine ran over 24 hours, it would run
CHKDSK when I rebooted , in which case it would usually repair the
MFT. Sometimes the corruption was so bad it BSOD'd on me and I had to
mount the disk as D: and run CHKDSK on it that way - which always
fixed it with one exception.
PerfectDisk re-arranged the pagefile and MFT and defragged them and
the machine has not had a corrupted NTFS volume since - which has been
about 1 week now. So, if anyone is having disk problems and the hard
disk passes its diagnostics, consider a constipated filesystem, and
use PerfectDisk to clean the crap out. Just make sure to clone the
disk because the first time I used it, it BSOD'd after doing an
offline defrag.
You need to do an online defrag the very first time, then an offline.
Do the kind that arranges files in their order of usage, but do that
only once. Then run the offline defrag. When it's done, let it count
down to reboot on its own and if it BSODs, just hit the reset button
on the front of your machine to do a hard reboot. It should then boot
properly.
--
"There is no distinctly native American criminal class save Congress."
--Mark Twain
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