Is defragging an AVI file a no no?

[videobread]

I've got a 26 gig avi for on my F drive. It's been there for two years. I can't defrag the drive. I can't even copy tthe 26 gig avi file to my C drive. The computer freezes. My computer has never frozen before. My son said don't defrag an avi file. Is the file corrupted or is defragging an avi a no no? Or what?

[Heywould3]

is it possible that your c drive is formated as FAT 32? does the avi file play fine? defraging an avi file wont hurt it. defrag just moves data it does nothing to the file itself.

post as much data as you can think about this file and your computer setup. i see you have xp but is it NTFS or fat?

[jagabo]

It sounds like your drive has developed some bad blocks in the middle of the AVI file.

[Cornucopia]

The **ONLY** time defragging a video (or audio or whatever) file could possibly do damage (by just the act of defraggin alone) is if you had a Striped (RAID 0) drive pair and your defragger didn't understand raid.

Otherwise, shouldn't make a difference.

Sure does sound like some bad blocks have developed...

Scott

[videobread]

Both F: and C: are NTFS. I tried a CHKDSK on F: and it locked in stage 4 of 5 "verifying file data". I assume the file is in fact corrupt. It plays crappy also and the sound is screwed up. It has been on the drive for two years. I will re-digitize from my source and start over.
Just for the record is defragging an avi OK or a no no?

[jagabo]

Defragging an AVI file should not cause any problems.

Since your drive looks to be developing bad blocks you should run chkdsk with the "scan and attemp recovery of bad sectors" option. That will locate the bad blocks and mark them bad so they are not used again. Otherwise some other file will end up using the bad blocks and you may lose something you can't replace. The drive may appear to be locked up at some point but it should eventually time out and continue. Run it overnight.

[RabidDog]

make a note of where the file is eg F:\documents\avi\camc.avi
then delete it from dos then check your disk, maybe do a surface scan or disk surface test .. best idea might be to do a full reformat of F:

[jagabo]

Actually, in my experience, once a drive develops bad blocks like this it's likely to get more soon. I would copy everything from the drive to a new drive right away. If I had a need, I might reformat the drive and use it for temporary storage of non-critical data.

[videobread]

I ended up reformatting the drive. Did a Format F: at the command prompt. Funny thing, the drive seems fine. Only the one 26 gig avi file had a problem. It's a 250 gig WD SATA. I have been using it to store iso files temporarily for the past three years. I've never had a drive go. My gut feel is that the problem was with the large avi file and not the drive. Maybe somehow it got corrupted or was bad in the first place, but probably not. I know I have defragged this drive in the past and never a problem. Bad drive is a new one for me.