How to Defragment a Hard Drive That Causes the System to Freeze up in Windows Vista

Computers tend to lose stability when a hard drive has a bad sector.

If your system starts to freeze while you defragment your hard drive, you might have a bad sector somewhere that prevents the hard drive from continuing to seek data. To force the computer to ignore or fix the bad sector, you must run the disk checker utility. Once you restart the computer after summoning the utility, the computer scans the entire disk for bad sectors and missing references that might cause the drive to freeze up.

Instructions

1. Click the "Start" menu and click type "cmd" at the bottom text box of the menu. Press "Enter."

2. Type "chkdsk /f" in the command line to start the disk checker. Restart the computer after you finish initiating the checking procedure. The utility doesn't scan the disk until you restart.

3. Click the "Start" menu after the computer restarts and click "All Programs," "Accessories," "System Tools" and "Disk Defragmenter." On some systems, the defragmenter might take about a minute to start. Wait until it starts up.

4. Select the disk you want to defragment from the list provided and click "Defragment" near the bottom of the window.

References

• Microsoft Technet: Chkdsk