I spent the better part of a day checking everything in the computer and I just couldn't find anything that would result in the problem I was having.
Finally, thinking that it might be a problem with Defrag, I loaded Norton Utilities which includes Norton SpeedDisk onto Drive C. The SpeedDisk product is a defragmenter but it always seems to work faster than the the Windows OS Defrag.
I really didn't have time to run SpeedDisk during the day, so that evening I carefully turned off Norton AntiVirus, set Norton SpeedDisk to run while I slept and went off thinking I'd found the perfect solution.
That was before I got to the computer the next morning and found I was stuck in exactly the same place on Drive C as I'd been before with Defrag.
Have you ever seen the movie Groundhog's Day, where the day just keeps repeating and repeating? I had the feeling I was living that movie realtime only with me it was Endless Defrag. This situation was beginning to irk me.
Well, at least, through the process of testing and elimination, I knew it wasn't a problem with Defrag. But by this time several days and several nights had been devoted to a task that should have taken, at most, a few hours.
I went into the System Configuration Utility's General sheet where I unchecked all the startup processes and restarted the computer. I rebooted, turned off Norton Antivirus, and started SpeedDisk again. This time I sat and watched the optimization process and I knew after a short time that optimization of my drives wasn't going any place. I was stuck exactly in the same place where I'd previously been stuck.
So, next I used the Rescue Disks that I'd kept packed with the computer to boot it up in Safe Mode. I tried running Defrag in Safe Mode and it failed just as dismally as it had when it wasn't in Safe Mode.
