Question about defrag

Hi,

I have a question about strange defrag behavior when I ran it from the command-line prompt. Yesterday I tried to defrag my HD using both Auslogic's defrag and Microsoft's GUI defrag. Auslogic reported over 30% fragmentation (lots of red blocks from the graphic display) but was not able to defrag it. When I use Microsoft's GUI defrag, it stated that the drive doesm't need to be defrag. Many of the fragmented files reported in Auslogic's defrag program was over 20GB size with strange '{...}' file names. I have no idea what those files are.

I found it strange that it doesn't need to defrag when it reported over 30% fragmentation. Then I decided to use defrag from command line prompt, just to see what happen. I used -w option to defrag large files. After it finished defragmenting my drive, I noticed that my drive's free space increased by 104GB!!! Disk usage stated I was using over 180GB before, and it dropped down to around 80GB after defragging. From my basic understanding of how defrag works, it shouldn't have change the amount of free space on my hard-drive, right? So how did my hard-drive changed from free space of 210GB to 314GB?

Hello mookiemeister,
That is a strange thing to happen.
The only thing i can think of is that the space was allocated to the HDD, but held no actual data, so when it was defragged, there was nothing to defrag and the space was freed up.

Just to be sure, i would run this free app.

Malwarebytes.org

Also, you may want to check your file system, follow this tutorial to do that.

http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/66978-system-files-sfc-command.html

Hope this helps, good luck and post your results, thanks.

You may want to run chkdsk /r from a command prompt...
Then re-try defrag.

Thanks for the replies. I'll try those suggestions and see if it'll find something wrong with my system.

I did all the suggestions. And this is what happened:

1) Malwarebytes's Anti-Malware Quick Scan reported a bad registry key Hijack.DisplayProperties at HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policy\Explorer\NoActiveDesktopChanges. I removed the bad key.
2) Malwarebytes's Anti-Malware Full Scan reported no problem.

3) SFC /scannow from administrator command-line prompt didn't find any problem.

4) Chkdsk /r then reboot without any problem.

Another thing is that after I did 'defrag -w' before and the amount of free space increased by over 100GB, Auslogic's defrag reported 0% fragmentation. So those large 20GB+ file with strange '{...}' file names were the culprit of the large fragmentation. I'm still not sure what those large files are and they they disappeared all of sudden, and my hard-drive space increased by over 100GB (not that I'm complaining with all that extra space). It's just strange.