re: Defragmenting my "C" drive, causes error
Saturday, January 9, 2010 at 11:12 pm
Windows Me Annoyances Discussion Forum
Posted by Ed
(741 messages posted)
I should have also said -
When you run ScanDisk for Windows (go to START > RUN and there type SCANDSKW.EXE
and click OK) it will report on the name and file location ("path") of every file
which exceeds the DOS limit.
So you don't have to do a lot of guesswork to track down any errant files that are
more than 8 levels deep. It will find them for you.
But it only does this if you tick/check the option "Report MS-DOS mode name length
errors" in the "Advanced" options section of the ScanDisk for Windows program before
running it.
Ed
On Saturday, January 9, 2010 at 10:47 pm, Ed wrote:
>One thing I forgot to mention. Defrag.exe is in origin a DOS-based program, and
so
>it will fail to complete (exhibiting the symptoms you've mentioned) if it encounters
>the notorious DOS "directory limit".
>
>DOS could only read a file if it was not more than 8 levels "deep". Defrag has the
>same limitation, because it is running on DOS fundamentally. DOS still can't read
>such a file, not even in the version of DOS that ships with Windows ME.
>
>But Windows doesn't have that limitation. So it's perfectly possible you've created
>more than 8 levels of subdirectories using Windows. The only time that will ever
>be a problem is in running the Defrag program, because Windows was built to overcome
>that particular drawback of DOS. In technical terms, the "path" (to the file) is
>too long for DOS to read.
>
>Therefore, you should check to see whether your hard disk has any files in a sub-directory
>that is more than 8 levels below the C: root directory.
>
>The (very easy) solution is to simply move them, using Windows, to a higher level
>directory. Make sure you get them all, because you may have inadvertantly done this
>with lots of files. I know I did!
>
>By the way, I strongly recommend that you only run Defrag after running ScanDisk
>for Windows in thorough mode and also ScanDisk for DOS (and run the latter
>in pure DOS mode, using the Windows ME "Emergency Boot Disk" floppy).
>
>Ed
>
>
>
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