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Hello there, I have recently bought a desktop PC from my friend which is about 4 years old. It has Windows Xp pro installed on it and works fine but i cannot defragment the hard drive. The Chkdsk utility does not allow to defragment the hard drive.It gives an error message saying "Chkdsk is scheduled to run on the volume. Please run Chkdsk /f". I cant figure out the problem is. Is it due to corrupt windows or the hard disk has gone bad? Please help
Looking at the issue i would suggest you to run the CHKDSK utility first on the hard drive before trying to defragment the drive. Chkdsk utility will check the hard drive by running some tests on it. The utility will also return the number of errors faced while running the test on the hard drive and will also repair it if possible. After checking the hard drive with chkdsk utility, try to defragment the drive. It will not give the same error message as you are already through with chkdsk.
As the computer is old it may be because of the old hard drive which must have developed Bad clusters on it. Hard drive like any other memory device develops bad clusters which are not accessible. This happens due to frequent rewrite of the data. SCNDSK utility can help you check if your hard drive has developed bad clusters or not. If there are more number of bad clusters on your hard drive then changing the hard drive is only solution to your problem.
You must have scheduled a task to run CHKDSK on a volume which is not allowing you to defragment the hard disk. You can remove the scheduled task and then try to defragment the drive. To remove the scheduled task, Go to Start menu-- Select All Programs-- Select Accessories-- Select System Tools-- Select Scheduled task. Now Select CHKDSK from the list of scheduled task and Now click on Delete this item under the Folder tasks. Now click on Apply and Select Ok. Now you will be able to defragment the drive without any problems.
Windows installation can also be the reason behind this. Windows files get easily corrupt due to different viruses which unknowingly get downloaded from the sites we visit. Apart from viruses Windows installation can also get corrupted if any software or drivers are tried to update and if the update stops mid way. Installing the fresh copy of windows will definitely solve the problem but before doing that be sure that the problem is due to windows.
Editing the system registry might just do the trick. To edit the system registry,
Click on Start menu, Click on Run, Inside the tab type "regdit", A registry editor window will open, Now click on find and enter the following in the blank tab "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\BootExecute". Once you locate this key, select it and then click on EDIT and select MODIFY. Now type "autocheck autochk *" and press enter. Now save the registry and restart the pc. Hopefully defragmenting the drive will not give any error.