[hinkley]

> 8 hour defrag

In the NT 4 era I had a defrag take almost 18 hours. I started it before leaving for the day and came in the next morning to find it an unknown percentage done. I didn’t trust it would be okay to restart the machine so I had to leave it.

That was a problem because we were running version control on this box. But by then everyone was bought in so we got a dedicated machine out of the ordeal, but that was super annoying.

We even called Microsoft and got through, but it turns out on NT defragment happened in real mode so there isn’t a lot of memory to buffer copied blocks. So it spends a lot of time seeking on the hard drive. So stupid.

[AshamedCaptain]

> out on NT defragment happened in real mode so there isn’t a lot of memory to buffer copied blocks

NT cannot run anything in real mode after ntldr. (And even boot time defragmenters run way after ntldr).

[hinkley]

Yeah the entire defrag process happens in a blue screen during the boot process.

There was a cheap defrag you could do while NT was running but it can’t move any system files, so after a few system updates you needed a full defrag.

[samstave]

5200 RPM HDD? likely contributed to time seeking?

[hinkley]

I don’t recall but that sounds plausible.