Computer updated during defrag, what to do next?

Rixanu · 24 Jan 2013

Last night I set my computer to defragment my hard drive, forgetting that earlier that day I had enabled automatic updates due to a university policy that forces you to enable automatic updates to access the internet. Needless to say, my computer rebooted to update in the middle of defragmentation. Everything seems to be in working order so far, but is there any precaution I should be taking before attempting to defragment again, such as checking for any disk errors? If so, how would I do that? And of course I'll disable automatic updates this time. The program I was using for defragmenting was Defraggler, if that helps at all. Thank you.

bdstx4 · 24 Jan 2013

Yours sounds like a standalone computer. On those I never enable any auto updating except Anti Virus software. Programs like various Adobe I allow to auto download but manually choose when to install. Enabling auto updates of any software they are also so unaware of what else is running for programs or other updaters. And many require restart to install. If you manually run Ms updates at least once a month you should be fine. Ms updates are every Tuesday with the largest block to come out 2nd Tuesday each month.
If you want to completely check your HDD files because defraggler was interrupted you can run CHKDSK /r on your C: drive or any other partitions you have. Very time consuming but it is thorough.
It is common for colleges to have these policies. So run Ms updates before you connect to college internet. If you run Ms updates every Wednesday before connecting to the college you should be ok.

MilesAhead · 24 Jan 2013

Check your free disk space. Often if a defragger gets its state scrambled, it will not clean up the disk space that should be freed after the file is successfully moved. I'm not sure if they use shadow services, hidden files, or whatever.

If the free disk space seems to be what's expected I would just leave things alone for a couple of days. See if everything feels normal. You can probably wait a couple of days to defrag without an anxiety attack right? :)

If nothing weird is detectable after a couple of days then I'd go ahead and defrag. Also if you don't have a backup imaging program you should get one and an external drive to store the backup image. There are plenty of high quality free ones available these days. I bet many are listed in the Free Great Programs for Windows Seven thread is Software forum.