External Hdd Tends To Freeze My Pc And Will Not Defrag, External HDD will not defrag

Hi, can you help,
I've got an 80gb External HDD that i use to put most of my files in, but for some reason over the last week or so it tends to freeze my PC and i've got to wait a while until it unfreezes itself.

Also when i try to defrag the External HDD it only goes to 1%, and i gave it enough time to gefrag i think i let it defrag for about 9hours, and still only goes to 1%.

I've updated all my anti-virus, but did not pick up any virus and i ran my trojan remover that did not pick up anything either.
Can someone help me and tell me what the problem could be.
Many thanks
Tony

How much free space on the drive?

If you've allowed free space to get too low, then defragging is almost impossible and also results in poor performance.

The obvious solution is to temporarily copy some of the data to your internal drive, perform the defrag, then copy the stuff back. Always assuming you've got space on your internal drive that is. If not... :rolleyes:

I've got about 26.9gb of space left, i know it wont defrag if you got less than 15% free space.

Run diags on the external drive.

Could you post details about this external drive?

Is it a prebuilt unit?
Make/Model?

Is it an enclosure with a drive installed?
Enclosure - make/model?
Drive - make/model?
Interface type?
Power supply?

Does it have several partitions? How many? What type?
Is it formatted NTFS or FAT32?

Is this what you meant by "no-brainer"?

If the drive is in use a lot, the defragmentation will never finish.
I used to see this problem when I used windows 98 all the time. It would get to 10%, then start over. Or get stuck at 10%.

Not sure if this still happens with modern programs/OSes.

I'd also recommend not using windows defragger and go with diskeeper 2007.

Could always try defragging in Safe Mode.

tony tends to ask and leave so who knows if this thread will go anywhere.