How long for disc defrag

[2414ginger]

Hi all
I must admit to not having defraged my desktop before in 4 years, HP Pavilion by the way.
And i am using Windows built inn defragmenter. I have 250 GB free space out of 450 GB
I decided after several tries to defrag the C drive, and it seeming to stop at 19% analyzed, that I needed more patience, it took 6 hours!!!!! over Sat night.
OK Sun morn 7am, so its telling me that I am 26% fragmented, so I click on defrag, now its analyzing again, is this normal?
Anyway its now almost 3pm on WEDNESDAY, its 36% consolidated on pass 12.

I have 2 questions,
How many more passes will there be? and how much longer can it take?

Many thanks for anyone who can offer me hope.
Pete

 

[Ztruker]

Try booting to Safe Mode and doing the defrag there.

 

[Berton]

It can help to turn off the power-saving features such as disk shutdown, sleep, hibernation, etc., lets the defrag run without interruption.

 

[strollin]

You will never recover the time you are spending trying to defrag your drive. You may see a very small increase in file access performance but the time wasted during the defrag will completely negate that.

I would try doing a chkdsk on your drive to see if it has other issues though.