Drive Genius 3 and defrag issues

Okay, I know all the arguments for and against defragmenting Mac drives, but I do have some pretty nastily defragged partitions. I do have iDefrag and that always worked well, but I just bought Drive Genius 3 recently (and it helped me fix my wife's iPod drive!) so I figured what the hey...

Thing is, every time I run the defrag on ANY partition on ANY drive, I get the progress animation for a while, but then the screen goes black and I can't do anything else unless I force the power off. Last night I started a defrag on a 100-gigabyte partition and after about 15 minutes I went to bed. Still had the animation at that point. But at this point the MacBook is still on, but with a black screen and the fan whirring away.

Is this....normal???

FTR, I'm doing this on the MacBook mentioned on the side of this post. I have a quad boot (Lion, SL, Ubuntu, Win7) and this happens whenever I boot to either Lion or SL and try to defrag anything. Haven't actually run defrag from my iMac, though -- too new...only had that a month and it's still blazingly fast, hardly any use compared to my MacBook.

Also, Drive Genius 3's support page describes a similar problem and suggests updating to version 3.1.1, and once the computer reboots, the defrag should continue as normal. Well....I actually have version 3.1.2, and no, it doesn't. Also, the fix is for 2011 Macs, but my problem happens on a late 2007 MacBook.

I can't speak for Drive Genius but iDefrag likewise takes a very long time to defrag a large drive. And most times, it will tell you that it needs control of the process which means you can't use the machine during that time. It took an overnight run to defrag my 2008 MacBook. Like you, my iMac is too new to require a defrag.

Have you contacted the Drive Genius support folks and asked them why the screen goes black even though you have the latest version?

Just a follow-up....upon rerererererereading the manual, I couldn't help but notice that it asked that the Mac be booted straight into Drive Genius via the CD, which contradicts the parts of the documents that say you can actually defrag the same volume you're booting from WITHOUT having to boot from the CD. Oh well....

What I was doing before was running the defrag the "standard" way -- that is, just going about my business and opening Drive Genius like any other app. But when I booted from the CD and went straight into Drive Genius. the defrags worked perfectly -- and even with 100+-gigabyte partitions that were over 70% fragmented, the defrags didn't take very long, easily under an hour.

Since I am already in the habit of making a clone of my boot drive using CCC, I've never seen the need to defragment.

About once a year or so I'll just boot from my clone drive and erase the original boot drive, then restore (again using CCC) from my clone. Works fine and "defragments/optimizes" the drive along the way.

About once a year or so I'll just boot from my clone drive and erase the original boot drive, then restore (again using CCC) from my clone. Works fine and "defragments/optimizes" the drive along the way.

Click to expand...

Out of curiosity, have you tested that by running iDefrag or Drive Genius to see what the state of fragmentation was before and after doing the cloning and restoring with CCC?

The reason I ask is because I have tried what you suggested and it does not work for me to clear fragmentation, however, for some reason, using Time Machine to restore does work quite well. (I have the latest version of iDefrag which I use to test with.)

I haven't, but Bombich goes on at length in an article on his website about how CCC supports the hot zones etc and he actually works for Apple so I have little reason to doubt his claims.

OK, I guess I should accept what Bombich says, however, it doesn't seem to be working out that way. Perhaps I'll drop an email to him and ask why. Thanks, chas.