Recently I have encountered problems when attempting to run Disk Defragmenter as an error appears ‘Error defragmenting drive C: Windows cannot finish defragmenting this drive because it has encountered a problem. Click Help and carry out the instructions for running Scan Disk, then try defragmenting again’. I followed the instructions to run ScanDisk, which took 6 hours to complete, but Disk Defragmenter still won’t function correctly. The computer is running Windows 98.

The Disk Defragmenter error message which is appearing can be due to a damaged Applog file. This file is used to log the order of files which are loaded when a particular program is started. This information is used by Disk Defragmenter so that the files can be reorganised on the hard drive in the order in which they are loaded when the programs start. There is an article on Microsoft Knowledge Base which explains how to clear the corrupted Applog file. This article is available at support.microsoft.com/kb/238165. Should you continue to have problems, try running ScanDisk and Disk Defragmenter through Windows Safe Mode. In any situation, if you find ScanDisk or Disk Defragmenter is running slowly, running the program through Safe Mode is a good option since there are no other processes or applications running in the background which could be interfering with the operation of ScanDisk. To start into Windows Safe Mode, restart the computer and when the ‘Starting Windows 98′ message is displayed (just before the Windows splash screen) start tapping the F8 key. The Windows boot menu should appear. Select ‘Safe Mode’ and press ENTER. Once Safe Mode has loaded, you will notice Windows looks a bit different. This is because Safe Mode only loads the bare essentials to get Windows booting. So, things like your video drivers are not loaded, but instead the Windows generic video drivers are loaded. Start ScanDisk and let this run until completion. After ScanDisk has completed, run Disk Defragmenter.