Will a restore fix "noncontiguous" free space?
Some months ago, on my dual boot system (Win 7 - Win 10), I used Acronis Disk Director to add space to the C partition of one drive, Win 7, as it was getting a bit short on free space. All went fine, but....after completion, any/all disk defrag or optimize programs now say it cannot be defragmented to less than 15%.
A search on the web offers no reason I can follow, but some tech sites say the "free space is not contiguous", that being the reason. Others offered addressing the page file, or other, but are not succinct, and I don't want to attempt that without knowing it will address the problem. The performance of the system has not be greatly affected, best I can tell.
So, wondered if doing a restore in Acronis 2017 should rewrite the entire partition, correcting this. Obviously, don't want to run a restore without some reason and possible fix.
Any comments would be appreciated.
Steve,
Thank you for your response. The C drive (Win 7 pro) is now utilizing 120 GIG with 70 GIG free, yet will still not defrag as noted. It did prior to my adding capacity to it, when there was about 20 GIG free, and I added 50 GIG with Disk Director. As noted, the only possible explanation I could find on this issue was "noncontiguous free space" being the cause and one remark saying Win could not find enough free space to defrag....but 70 GIG, total is available. And yes, it is an HDD. I'm repeating myself here to some degree.
There is nothing on this partition except Win 7 and program files...no data at all, that all stored on another partition, so I do not clearly see how I could move anything off the partition temporarily, or would at least be very reluctant to remove program files to store and then recopy.
As this is a dual boot system, with Win 10 pro on another disk and partition, I have tried booting into Win 10 and running a defrag there on Win 7, as offline/inactive. Same result...no improvement.
My thought with Acronis, with which I can also make another backup in Win 10 of Win 7, this time in Acronis 2020, was that either I, manually, or Acronis would at least quick format the partition, and then rewrite correcting this "free space" issue, if that is what it is, as it appears. All this can be done booted into Win 10, but I am hesitant, as always reluctant to run a restore unless in serious trouble. I have run perhaps three restores since about 2010, all successfully.
I would have to do a little checking on booting into Win 7 as you suggest, having not done that before, as I recall.
Does any of this provide any additional info, or suggest any other course? I can live with it as it, but would prefer to fix, but not break it, trying.
Allan, the other possibility here is that your HDD is starting to exhibit some problems that could be preventing any better defrag results, i.e. increasing numbers of bad blocks or sectors etc?
If you have a spare HDD of the same or larger size, then you could try restoring a whole disk image of the current drive to that new disk, then a) check fragmentation after the restore, and b) do a new defrag of the partitions and see if you can achieve better results?
Thanks again Steve,
No spare HDD and this one is not that old, anyway. The problem seemed also specific to adding 50 GIG to the C partition with Acronis Disk Director, but there is no forum or other for that software that I can find, and nothing found online noting an enlargement of a drive partition affecting defrag.
I booted into Win 10 this morning and ran defrag from command prompt on Win 7 with consolidation of free space also selected, and it ran seven hours with no improvement at all.
So, either I try something else, or just live with it, but still prefer to resolve it if possible.
I appreciate your taking the time to respond, and may pursue this further. If I find a successful way to address it, especially if it's an Acronis restore, I will follow up with that here just for record.
Allan
Allan, there is a separate Acronis Disk Director Forum but the product has been untouched for many years and has lots of limitations when compared to alternative free partition managers such as MiniTool Partition Wizard (that I use regularly!).
When you say that you added 50 GB to the C: partition, I am assuming that you moved this from another partition on the same disk drive, which is something that I have done lots of times over the years, i.e. resized an adjacent partition to create free space, then moved the partition over to get the free space to next to where it is needed, then expanded the partition to incorporate the extra space.
Steve,
I somehow missed the forum on DD, and have done a cursory check there, finding (so far) nothing to address my specific issue. Thanks for the tip on an alternate program. I have had DD for years, and found it adequate for my purposes, plus am used to it.
Your assumption is correct on my process...making free space available from an adjacent partition, and then moving it to the C partition. I have also done this repeatedly over the years, but never had it create any usual, or adverse, effect prior to this instance. I don't think it's DD...but the "architecture" of the drive now with files that cannot be moved and the noncontiguous free space noted. At least that's all any source found can offer me to date, and some of this is getting well over my knowledge level.
One thought has been to temporarily delete the page file, try the defrag as before from the other system boot, then enable the page file again. The last shot remains a restore, assuming that it will rewrite the entire partition "properly".
Thanks for your continued input.
Allan, if you are booted from the Win 10 partition, then you should be able to simply delete both the pagefile.sys and hiberfil.sys files from the Win 7 partition then retry the defrag of that one. Both files get recreated when Windows boots hence why they are also excluded by default by Acronis for backups.
You could also give Piriform Defraggler a try if you wished as an alternative to using the normal Windows defrag tool.
Steve,
That time saving process had not occurred to me...but of course it will save going back and forth.
I will try that, I think.
Also aware of the CC cleaner program, but have not really needed an upgrade to date beyond the inherent tools.
Thanks
As an update on this...nothing previously noted has worked. CC defraggler was also installed, per Steve, and could not correct the problem in boot mode. Win 10 command prompt defrag, with the page file deleted, also did not correct the problem. The consolidate free space feature of that program showed a 2% per hour rate of progress (200 GIG partition, 70 GIG free space, supposedly about 20 GIG fragmented), and not having fifty hours to spare, if it was actually working at all, the program was canceled.
So, I am back to living with it, or trying a restore in Acronis, and hoping that a restore will write to the disk in such a manner as to consolidate the free space. If I try this, and it works or not, I will repost here with the result for record.
Allan, having just spent a couple of days helping a friend with a very, very slow performing Acer Aspire AIO computer, I hit similar issues with a Toshiba 1TB HDD (2.5") that were only solved after I cloned it to a spare Seagate Barracuda 1TB HDD then swapped in the Seagate drive, after which I was able to use the built-in Windows disk optimise tools to do a proper full defrag and consolidation of data on the replacement drive! I have no idea what the issue with the original Toshiba drive is other that it has been a real 'pain'!