Defragmentation Problem

Hi. I just tried to defrag my harddrive. It worked with Drive C, but when I try to defrag Drive D (physical Disk) then I get an errormessage, saying there isn't engough RAM to defrag the drive.

I got 640 MB RAM, Win98. On Dirve C the biggest file was 450 Megs, where on Drive D some files are about 1.5 Gigabyte. So I think maybe it has something to do with the file-size: could it be win98 is unable to defrag a drive when there are files that are bigger than the RAM? Virtual Memory is already set to be handled by Windows, with no max.

How could i fix this? I mean, without to replace the OS.
Thanks.

EDIT: an additional note: I am shocked, I have just seen I got some files on drive D that are bigger than 2 Gigabyte, how can this be?!?!?
The files have been created by MAGIX Video Deluxe, some Avis (some in "windows\temp" and some created by importing MiniDV Video over firewire):
4'182'859 KB
2'947'969 KB
3'149'010 KB

Though the limit is 2 Gigabyte in Win98. Maybe Magix installed some kind of patch? I guess the 4 Gigs file must be created when I made a DVD using MAGIX some time ago. Althoug the DVD uses splitted VOB files, each one not bigger than 2 Gigs, MAGIX seems to write a temporary Avi, made of parts that are up to 4 Gigs.

Try moving enormous files to C, defrag D, then move them back?

Get a proper defragmentation tool. PerfectDisk is your friend.

By the way, Thanks FlameDuck, I checked PD out last time you posted it. invaluable and beats shyte out of DiskKeeper!

I think you've answered it already. Defrag cannot read the >2gb files.

Are those files truly larger than 2GB?
It's possible to have some corruptions in your file system, leading to damaged files and/or misreported file sizes. Defragmentation programs don't know how to handle those properly then.

Before trying to do another defrag, check for errors on the drive and repair them. (checkdisk, also listed under the 'tools' tab of your drive properties just like defrag itself)

jfk: Raw video is massive. I switched from 98 to XP when I found out that 98 can't make files > 4GB which it seemed to hit after just 10 mins of 640x480 raw video via a TV card. Now I copy stuff from my MiniDV via firewire and a 1 hour tape is 12Gb unconpressed (well it's compressed by the camera) and that's much better but 98 would never handle such a big file size. Why 4GB? It's an unsigned 32-bit number. 2Gb would be signed but file sizes aren't signed, who's ever heard of a (minus) -20Kb file "dark data" which explodes if it comes into contact with real data?

xlsior is right, always scandisk before degrah anyway. Also clean out Windows Temp and you IE cache just to save time. This is a good tip before running full virus scans and spyware scans too (the cleaning out bit).

Oh Perfect Disk, that's nice, just got it and chucked Diskeeper in the bin.

thanks, a lot of information here. Perfect Disk may be a good product, tho I don't want to buy a 40$ defrag tool , a thing that I do every other year only (ok I see it's a 30 days testversion, so it could be a solution for this year).
Well I thought an other solution would be to move the files to an other disk, then sort them by size, then move them back. Xlsior - thanks, I'll check that. I guess a size to 4 GB is possible although a lot of programs have 2 GB limits due to their internal useage of signed 32 Bit adresses, a typical example would be blitz.
Files bigger than 4 GB are not possbile in the FAT32 format AFAIK.

exactly and 98 is FAT32. When I got XP I made sure I formatted it with NTFS as you cna still format it with Fat32 which would be dumb.

I'll check out perfect disk now.

I found Diskkeeper Lite. This seems to be freeware for Win98 (somebody said it's about the same as the default defrag in WinXP). I wonder if it will be able to handle the 4 gigs files in Win98.

Spend the money and be done with it :)

I just totally sorted my system out with Perfect Disk 30 day trial. I liked the boot time defrag of system files. Also ran Bootvis afterwards for optimim load time.