I read on another forum that if you defrag your harddrive that it royally can mess up Morrowind and the gameplay. The person who posted this information is a long time Morrowind player who seems to have learned a lesson the hard way. What do you think? Anyone else experience problems from defragging their harddrive?

[ 06-13-2003, 12:36 PM: Message edited by: Albromor ]

I defragged my harddrive about a month ago.

No problem at all.

C

i defragged on a regular basis and my version was fine. only thing that messed it up was formatting c: then partitioning it and installing win98 and winXP as a duel boot. a quick note, morrowind was on my d: drive (seperate drive). defragging should be fine.

Considering the occasional defrag is essential to keeping ones computer running smoothly I don't think it would cause whatever problems this poor sap has experienced. My opinion? He's made a minor misdiagnosis of the situation. There must have been something else he's done that he just hadn't recalled that caused the errors.

Actually, a very fragmented drive would decrease performance, and can cause hashing and drive failure. The only way a defrag would ruin a file is if the new block for a file piece was bad. Scandisk should always be run before defrag to identify and isolate bad sectors.

Both of these tests are essential to good PC health and performance.

My hunch was leaning toward what you guys have expressed, but with Morrowind and all the the things I had to do just to get it to install, load and run smoothly (with a computer that more than matched their recommended specs), I wasn't going to take a chance! Thanks!

If you are afraid that it will ruin your morrowind, save your save file on a portable hard disk. then run defrag. in this way if anything happens at least you still have your save game file.

Defrag won't ruin anything running on your computer, unless data gets moved to a bad sector: it simply moves data. So don't worry. But remember, if you ever needed to back up morrowind, you only need to backup the \save and \data files directories. savegames can be quite bulky (about 5-6 mb each), but when zipped they deflate to 10% of their original size.

Well I went ahead and defragged and then I played. No problem whatsoever.