Is it possible to defragment an unallocated HDD ?

[Halina]

I have a external Western Digital usb hdd. Because of some bugs, I wanted to try to defragment, but it appears as unallocated under Windows XP ?

The only way to make "active" and to defragment and initialize so I would not sure because suddenly I will lose all my data on it.

My question is, is there a way to defragment an unallocated hdd?

[kraal]

Do you mean that you have a hard disk that is formatted in something somewhere and want Windows to recognize it?

[mv]

It is very unlikely, the FAT32 is not suitable for such use, and NTFS is a bit too proprietary.

Anyway, this is certainly not the fragmentation that causes these problems. I think a USB power a bit limited, or the disk that consumes more than 2.5W deliverable by the USB.

[Halina]

I think also a priority format to avoid exporting hdd records on the pc to make them available on the net.

I try just to defragment the disk to see if this will solve my problems reading.

There is no way that the hard drive appears as unallocated?

[mv]

I do not think it is a proprietary format issue. Must be just a file system from the Unix/Linux. If you really want to access the hard drive, you will have to test from a Linux distribution.