This is more of a warning. What happened to me may just be an isolated case, however I just dodged a bullet.
Diskeeper as many of you know is a disk defragementation application. It comes in several flavors, I'm using the Home version. There is a "feature" that automatically sets disk volumes to be defragged at such and such time. You can change when this happens or tell it to not defrag at all, or I should say that's what suppose to happen.
This morning I did what I've done dozens of times before. I removed one of my "portable" drives in a drawer from my upstairs PC and put it in my downstairs PC.
I stared to render a small project in Vegas. It got maybe twenty minutes into it and my system locked up. I figured oops, maybe I went too far with my overclocking. So I tried again, second crash but at a different time.
I next looked at the Event log. Diskeeper caused the hang. What happened and it wasn't the first time, is Diskeeper out of the blue decided it was time to defrag my portable drive. Remember it wasn't scheduled. In fact is was set to NEVER be defraged automatically. Since this was the drive I was rendering from, crash. OK, that made me mad enough, but just as a precaution I ran checkdisk.
Windows has a neverous breakdown. This is a NTFS volume on a 200 GB drive. I have lots of important files on it. Because the crash happened due to Diskeeping attempting to defrag it and hung in the middle it trashed part of the file allocation table. That's a big bad mistake that can cause you to loose much if not all of your data on the drive, because the file allocation table is what records what's where on the drive. Without it Windows is blind. Actually, now that I think about it, I think the file allocation table is called something else in NTFS, but anyhow...
Lucky for me it was a NTFS file system and while one warning page after another flew place warning this is bad, and so is this, and this and this on a pretty pale blue screen NTFS is a self-repairing file system so it was able to recover. I can only imagine how screwed I would have been if this was a older FAT 32 file system.
So needless to say I hosed Diskeper and it never will see the light of day on any of my computers again.
So if you have Diskeeper, and use removable drives what happens when you shuffle them around is Diskeeper not being the brightest software sees the drive as a "new" drive and all on its own does you the "favor" of trying to defrag it, not when you tell it, rather whenever it feels like without any kind of warning at all. I can do without such crude software.
Diskeeper as many of you know is a disk defragementation application. It comes in several flavors, I'm using the Home version. There is a "feature" that automatically sets disk volumes to be defragged at such and such time. You can change when this happens or tell it to not defrag at all, or I should say that's what suppose to happen.
This morning I did what I've done dozens of times before. I removed one of my "portable" drives in a drawer from my upstairs PC and put it in my downstairs PC.
I stared to render a small project in Vegas. It got maybe twenty minutes into it and my system locked up. I figured oops, maybe I went too far with my overclocking. So I tried again, second crash but at a different time.
I next looked at the Event log. Diskeeper caused the hang. What happened and it wasn't the first time, is Diskeeper out of the blue decided it was time to defrag my portable drive. Remember it wasn't scheduled. In fact is was set to NEVER be defraged automatically. Since this was the drive I was rendering from, crash. OK, that made me mad enough, but just as a precaution I ran checkdisk.
Windows has a neverous breakdown. This is a NTFS volume on a 200 GB drive. I have lots of important files on it. Because the crash happened due to Diskeeping attempting to defrag it and hung in the middle it trashed part of the file allocation table. That's a big bad mistake that can cause you to loose much if not all of your data on the drive, because the file allocation table is what records what's where on the drive. Without it Windows is blind. Actually, now that I think about it, I think the file allocation table is called something else in NTFS, but anyhow...
Lucky for me it was a NTFS file system and while one warning page after another flew place warning this is bad, and so is this, and this and this on a pretty pale blue screen NTFS is a self-repairing file system so it was able to recover. I can only imagine how screwed I would have been if this was a older FAT 32 file system.
So needless to say I hosed Diskeper and it never will see the light of day on any of my computers again.
So if you have Diskeeper, and use removable drives what happens when you shuffle them around is Diskeeper not being the brightest software sees the drive as a "new" drive and all on its own does you the "favor" of trying to defrag it, not when you tell it, rather whenever it feels like without any kind of warning at all. I can do without such crude software.