Defragging a 120gb Windows 95 drive? \ VOGONS

Defragging a 120gb Windows 95 drive?

Topic actions

First post, by thepirategamerboy12

Posted on 2025-10-01, 14:59

thepirategamerboy12 Offline

Rank Oldbie

Rank: Oldbie
Posts: 529
Joined: 2015-03-20, 14:53

I was just wondering about this. My main retro gaming PC is a PMMX 233 machine running Windows 95, for the most part it works great. Though, the drive in it is 120gb and the built in Windows defrag just doesn't seem to work properly with the it. Only solution I've found so far is to take the drive out of the machine and hook it up to my main modern PC via a USB adapter and defrag it on there, but that's a pain in the ass. Is there any kind of perhaps bootable CD or floppy solution for doing this that'll work on this PC? Thanks.

Reply 1 of 6, by AncapDude

Posted on 2025-10-01, 16:03

AncapDude Offline

Rank Newbie

Rank: Newbie
Posts: 55
Joined: 2025-07-31, 11:38
Location: Hesse, Germany

Maybe there is a better third party defragger out there. I am also going to search for one as the built in defragger is not that good. However I have only 4GB drive and it works there. I think there are also newer or patched Versions of the official defragger from 98se or me or the unofficial Service Packs which should work fine with 48bit LBA.

Reply 2 of 6, by BinaryDemon

Posted on 2025-10-01, 16:23

BinaryDemon Offline

Rank Oldbie

Rank: Oldbie
Posts: 814
Joined: 2018-01-17, 00:35

If the computer bios supports booting from CD-ROM, you might want to use one of the specialized Linux Terminal distro's to handle defrag and other disk partitioning actions.

Reply 3 of 6, by Jo22

Posted on 2025-10-01, 16:32

Jo22 Offline

Rank l33t++

Rank: l33t++
Posts: 11359
Joined: 2009-12-13, 07:06
Location: Europe

O&O Defrag 2000 Freeware 3.5 ?

I've used O&O Defrag 2000 on Windows XP for over 10 years and it was very efficient!
It can run on Windows NT4/2000/XP, I think.

If the PC can run Windows 95, it should be able to run latest NT 4, as well.
Or Windows 2000, maybe, which still was i486 compatible without needing any patches.

"Time, it seems, doesn't flow. For some it's fast, for some it's slow.
In what to one race is no time at all, another race can rise and fall..." - The Minstrel

//My video channel//

Reply 4 of 6, by thepirategamerboy12

Posted on 2025-10-01, 19:28

thepirategamerboy12 Offline

Rank Oldbie

Rank: Oldbie
Posts: 529
Joined: 2015-03-20, 14:53

AncapDude wrote on 2025-10-01, 16:03:

Maybe there is a better third party defragger out there. I am also going to search for one as the built in defragger is not that good. However I have only 4GB drive and it works there. I think there are also newer or patched Versions of the official defragger from 98se or me or the unofficial Service Packs which should work fine with 48bit LBA.

One I did try was a later version of Norton Speed Disk, that also didn't work and in fact completely hung the machine. Tbh NU for Windows is pretty bloaty anyway as I came to find out.

Reply 5 of 6, by thepirategamerboy12

Posted on 2025-10-01, 19:29

thepirategamerboy12 Offline

Rank Oldbie

Rank: Oldbie
Posts: 529
Joined: 2015-03-20, 14:53

Jo22 wrote on 2025-10-01, 16:32:
O&O Defrag 2000 Freeware 3.5 ? […]
Show full quote

O&O Defrag 2000 Freeware 3.5 ?

I've used O&O Defrag 2000 on Windows XP for over 10 years and it was very efficient!
It can run on Windows NT4/2000/XP, I think.

If the PC can run Windows 95, it should be able to run latest NT 4, as well.
Or Windows 2000, maybe, which still was i486 compatible without needing any patches.

I appreciate the suggestion and I may try that on one of my XP machines to see what that's like, but I really only want this PC to run 95. Anything NT is just far inferior for gaming especially on this kind of machine imo.

Reply 6 of 6, by leonardo

Posted on 2025-10-01, 19:55

leonardo Offline

Rank Oldbie

Rank: Oldbie
Posts: 600
Joined: 2013-08-17, 14:42

You can just drop in the 98/ME defragger to see if that does it, but I usually just break up a 120 GB disk to 32 GB volumes anyway, so I'm not actually 100% certain that those will work.

I will have to dig into my archive to see what alternatives to the standard tools were popular at the time. If this was the early 2000's, you'd find a ton of alternatives on one of these download sites/repositories sites people used to frequent for software for sure...

[Install Win95 like you were born in 1985!] on systems like this or this.

Go to top of page Go to top of page

Back to General Old Hardware