Defragmentation could have gone wrong

[steenkh]

I had just completed a backup when I decided to try out the defragmentation tool of my brand new Hard Disk Manager 8.5. I have 3 main partitions on my hard disk, and I defragmented all three, which made it necessary to boot after the first one, which was the system partition (C:).

After the third partition was defragmented, I noticed that my wireless card had lost connection, and I could not get it started again. I could either boot again, or I could try a disable/enable. I tried the last, but the disable would not complete, after which I booted the machine. When Windows XP was up and running, the wireless card was completely gone!

At this point I suspected that something had gone awry during the defragmentation, but I have too little evidence to prove it. I did look around for some tool that could verify that all files were like when the backup was taken, but I could not find one, and I decided on restoring the backup instead.

Has there ever been trouble with defragmentation before?

[ams]

I did run defragmentation for my pc and never got problems with it. Sure, it took long time but results also were good.

[steenkh]

After a long pause, I tried the defragmentation once again - this time after I had a good backup of the system. But alas, the results were similar in the sense that the defragmentation ended without error, but subsequently a checkdisk revealed a number of cross-linked files and lost clusters. My assessment is that these were all files that were really deleted by had been somehow restored by the defragmentation process.

I am not happy with this result because it shows that one cannot have complete faith in the file system after a defragmentation with Hard Disk Manager. I cannot imagine that I will use the defragmentation functionality again.

[ams]

Do you really think that cross linked errors were referring to your deleted data?
Is there any file corrupted after use of defrag?

[steenkh]

Do you really think that cross linked errors were referring to your deleted data?
Yes, because chkdsk wrote out the names of some of the files it recovered. I did not see a single file that was not supposed to have been deleted.

Is there any file corrupted after use of defrag?
It is hard to say. Although I had a ready backup, I did not restore the drive. Chkdsk is not finding anything, and no program has been affected by corrupted files so far.

I would have loved to inform Paragon of my findings, but as a private customer, I only had 14 days of support, and they are now long gone. I can only hope that they will sometimes read this forum.

[ams]

hey steenkh, you are not correct here. Guys from support are really nice. My support expired 4 months ago and even after that I got well and timely support from them. Since then I keep my products and support up to date that prolongs my support.

[steenkh]

I am glad to hear that. I will contact them when I get back from the Christmas vacation.

Merry Christmas!