pghash.dat and defragmenting

I had the message from PG that defragment asked to execute, since I did not have defragment scheduled in scheduled tasks, I denied it at this time.

When I did launch defragment, I received the message that defragment could not be done in pghash.dat where there were 6 and 8 files.

I have not been able to find anything about this in my research. Is there some step in PG that I need to do before I defragment c: so all files will be defragmented?

 

Hi suebaby41,

XP runs housekeeping routines when it detects that your system is idle. One of them involves defragmenting. I give defrag.exe and dfrgntfs.exe permission to run. If you want to defrag pghash.dat and pguard.dat, you have to disable PG first. It is optional and not necessary as I believe Gavin has said that PG itself defrags pghash.dat and pguard.dat.

Nick

 

Hi suebaby41,

I am not sure of what you mean by this. pghash.dat is a file, only 1 file, it is not a folder. Could you please explain a bit more what you are referring to? TIA ....

 

Hi puff-m-d,

I think suebaby41 meant fragments, not files.

Nick

 

Yep, Peter, I use Vcom 's defragger and never a peep about not defragging the .dat files, I am wondering if some defraggers just leave running protected files or even sets them to be defragged on reboot.
My registry defragger completes it's defrag after a reboot with a warning that that the defrag will not be complete until windows is re-started, so I guess it does before any other windows services load.

Cheers. Pilli

 

Yes, I meant fragments not files. Sorry. The windows defragmenter would not defrag the phash.dat file but I had not disabled PG so I will try that. Should I get another defragmenter? Thanks for the assistance.

 

Perfect Disk silently skips file which cannot be moved since they are in use after some tries. A informational message on this containing the name and path of these files will be written to the systems event log though.

 

Starting with Windows 2000 Microsoft requires disk defragmenters to use the Windows supplied API's to move files around. So if a file cannot be moved because it's locked or otherwise in use most of the wider known defragmentation applications will not be able to defragment such files (during an online defragmentation, things look different during boot time defragmentation runs). The warning behavior may depend on the application used, most defragmenters I know just silently skip such files (O&O Defrag, Perfect Disk, Diskeeper).

 

As far as i know i have never witnessed Process Guard defrag its own .dat files.

 

Neither have I. However, I have noticed that the *.dat files seem to not get as fragmented over time as they did in previous PG versions (where 6-8 fragments was common). I don't disable PG when I run PerfectDisk or O&O.

Nick