Drive Genius 3 and defrag issue...

[dauber]

Okay, I know all the arguments for and against defragmenting Mac drives, but I do have some pretty nastily defragged partitions. I do have iDefrag and that always worked well, but I just bought Drive Genius 3 recently (and it helped me fix my wife's iPod drive!) so I figured what the hey...

Thing is, every time I run the defrag on ANY partition on ANY drive, I get the progress animation for a while, but then the screen goes black and I can't do anything else unless I force the power off. Last night I started a defrag on a 100-gigabyte partition and after about 15 minutes I went to bed. Still had the animation at that point. But at this point the MacBook is still on, but with a black screen and the fan whirring away.

Is this....normal???

FTR, I'm doing this on the MacBook mentioned on the side of this post. I have a quad boot (Lion, SL, Ubuntu, Win7) and this happens whenever I boot to either Lion or SL and try to defrag anything. Haven't actually run defrag from my iMac, though -- too new...only had that a month and it's still blazingly fast, hardly any use compared to my MacBook.

 

[Markc1024]

http://www.prosofteng.com/support/drivegenius3.php?faq=496

 

[dauber]

Oh...and I should have added that I know about that...and I also should have mentioned that I'm running the latest update, 3.1.2 (newer than what's on the link), and their solution doesn't work.

Plus, that's for a 2011 Mac, but the problem is on a late 2007 MacBook.

 

[dauber]

Just a follow-up....upon rerererererereading the manual, I couldn't help but notice that it asked that the Mac be booted straight into Drive Genius via the CD, which contradicts the parts of the documents that say you can actually defrag the same volume you're booting from WITHOUT having to boot from the CD. Oh well....

What I was doing before was running the defrag the "standard" way -- that is, just going about my business and opening Drive Genius like any other app. But when I booted from the CD and went straight into Drive Genius. the defrags worked perfectly -- and even with 100+-gigabyte partitions that were over 70% fragmented, the defrags didn't take very long, easily under an hour.

 

[Fishrrman]

"What I was doing before was running the defrag the "standard" way -- that is, just going about my business and opening Drive Genius like any other app."

The best way to defrag or optimize a volume is to boot from a DIFFERENT volume, launch your defragger, and then "aim it" at the target volume.

Notice that I said "volume" as distinguished from "drive". If you have a drive partitioned into two bootable volumes (each with its own system), it's possible to boot from one partition and defrag another.

Easiest is to have a second, bootable drive.

 

[dauber]

"What I was doing before was running the defrag The best way to defrag or optimize a volume is to boot from a DIFFERENT volume, launch your defragger, and then "aim it" at the target volume.

...which is exactly what I was doing when I was having the problem.

Basically, if I boot from any kind of hard drive, the defrag in Drive Genius doesn't work (everything else does, though), but if I boot from the CD, the defrag works fine.

 

[Minicube]

This is interesting, and annoying. Why on earth would one have to boot from a cd (as opposed to another volume)? I had this happen with Disk Warrior also if the damage to a drive is bad, it won't rebuild and suggest booting from a CD, which does work, but why or why? Booting from a CD takes forever and requires another reboot when it's done.