Huge Fragmentation issue after Overclocking

[acewolf21]

Intel Core 2 Duo E6550
Asus P5Q SE2 Motherboard
ATI Radeon 5770 512MB
Samsung DDR2 800Mhz Memory 1GBx2
Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 ST3500418AS

I overclocked my Intel Core 2 Duo E6550 from 2.33Ghz to 2.7Ghz (lowered memory speed to 667Mhz for a 1:1 ratio with FSB) I have tested the stability with Prime95 and it was well under 59C at full load (I have been using this OC for a week now). Some of the games that were installed on HDD started acting weirdly since yesterday like GTA IV lag/freezing while driving and radio stations' just stopped playing. Mass Effect 2 kept crashing after trying to load or (loading screen says its loading but taking more then 5min!) I ran Iobit Smart Defrag and it said 3180 files needs to be defraged. I let it defrag harddrive but after PC restart it just said 36 files need to be defragged... I reset BIOS to defaults and restarted PC and it just showed more fragmented files :|

Do i need to format HDD to fix this and do i select Format Using NTFS (Quick) or normal Format Using NTFS ?
If i overclocked without locking PCI-Express to 100 and used the HDD like this for a week can it damage the harddrive?

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

 

[RickyT23]

Intel Core 2 Duo E6550
Asus P5Q SE2 Motherboard
ATI Radeon 5770 512MB
Samsung DDR2 800Mhz Memory 1GBx2
Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 ST3500418AS

I overclocked my Intel Core 2 Duo E6550 from 2.33Ghz to 2.7Ghz (lowered memory speed to 667Mhz for a 1:1 ratio with FSB) I have tested the stability with Prime95 and it was well under 59C at full load (I have been using this OC for a week now). Some of the games that were installed on HDD started acting weirdly since yesterday like GTA IV lag/freezing while driving and radio stations' just stopped playing. Mass Effect 2 kept crashing after trying to load or (loading screen says its loading but taking more then 5min!) I ran Iobit Smart Defrag and it said 3180 files needs to be defraged. I let it defrag harddrive but after PC restart it just said 36 files need to be defragged... I reset BIOS to defaults and restarted PC and it just showed more fragmented files :|

Do i need to format HDD to fix this and do i select Format Using NTFS (Quick) or normal Format Using NTFS ?
If i overclocked without locking PCI-Express to 100 and used the HDD like this for a week can it damage the harddrive?

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

It is possible that your hard drive is too full. Go to My Computer, right click on the C: and select properties, it will show you how much free space you have. If you are 80-90% full or more then that is the problem. Un-install a couple of large games then try and de-frag again.

I would recommend using Windows defrag tool also. It takes longer but supposedly works better.

Finally if you do decide to do a fresh install of Windows and format your HDD you should be able to just use the fast format option, because the disk has already been formatted to NTFS before. None of the fragmentation will remain on the disk even after a fast format and clean install.
A clean install of Windows usually speeds the machine up because it cleans out the registry and gets rid of any crapware which may have been on your computer.....

 

[acewolf21]

My HDD was only 20% full and 80% free (500GB) when i ran defragment. I don't have crapware on my HDD at all... I do a registry and virus/malware scan every week and most of the stuff on my PC are just games. I am an experienced PC user, I just never bothered with overclocking. I red that when overclocking i have to lock PCI and PCI-Express so they are not overclocked with the FSB. Unfortunately i did not know this until after i OCed to 2.7GHz, i was just worried that this might have caused Data Corruption or causing the fragmentation on HDD.

 

[RickyT23]

My HDD was only 20% full and 80% free (500GB) when i ran defragment. I don't have crapware on my HDD at all... I do a registry and virus/malware scan every week and most of the stuff on my PC are just games. I am an experienced PC user, I just never bothered with overclocking. I red that when overclocking i have to lock PCI and PCI-Express so they are not overclocked with the FSB. Unfortunately i did not know this until after i OCed to 2.7GHz, i was just worried that this might have caused Data Corruption or causing the fragmentation on HDD.

OK, well there are some things to try:

1 - I would put your RAM back up to 800Mhz - why not? A ratio of 4:5 should be OK, the RAM is rated at 800Mhz so why not use that?

2 - Try the Wndows defrag tool (OK I know you obviously keep your drive defragged because you have a third party tool, and I'm no expert but I have been advised to use the Windows tool in the past)

3 - 4Gb of RAM would help run GTA4 a bit better, I used to run it wth 2Gb and it ran OK but there were frequent slowdowns, especially if I forced the "high" settings on using the commandline.txt. Getting a new kit (2x2Gb PC6400) helped that a lot.

4 - Try a format - fast format will be fine.

Good luck trying to fix your problem!

 

[vvhocare5]

Lets be clear where you are now

Are you back at 2.33GHz? If yes - are the games running the way they were previously? Ignore the information from the hard drive for now - you are mixing your issues. Solve one thing at a time...

Corruption on the hard drive will show up as blue screens or errors, not slowdowns - there are always files that cannot be defragged, they are locked by the OS.

 

[RickyT23]

I red that when overclocking i have to lock PCI and PCI-Express so they are not overclocked with the FSB. Unfortunately i did not know this until after i OCed to 2.7GHz, i was just worried that this might have caused Data Corruption or causing the fragmentation on HDD.

OK, somebody correct me if Im wrong, but if the PCI/PCIe frequency was O/Ced it would only really effect any PCI devices such as the Radeon 5770 (which could probably take it cause the new Radeons overclock REALLY well), and it wouldnt effect the SATA controller at all, so its unlikely to have caused corruption that way.

 

[saaiello]

OK, somebody correct me if Im wrong, but if the PCI/PCIe frequency was O/Ced it would only really effect any PCI devices such as the Radeon 5770 (which could probably take it cause the new Radeons overclock REALLY well), and it wouldnt effect the SATA controller at all, so its unlikely to have caused corruption that way.

The onboard sata controllers are consider part of the PCIE bus thats how they connect to the rest of computer so overclocking the bus too high could cause damage to the sata controllers also while overclocking make sure you didnt mess with the south bridge voltage it could cause harm to the controller as well. But it most likely was that you overclocked your ram too high when memory is overclocked too much funny stuff all ov er the computer will start happening drivers will crash files will become corrupted and yes hard drive will become very fragmented. So put your memory to its default settings as well as the rest of your overclock and defragment your drive also your registry will probably need cleaning as well too so get CCleaner and use its registry cleaner tool and its disk cleaner tool tool. Don't listen to ricky keep your ram at 1:1 ratio.

After you get all that in order then make sure you have full understanding of everything to do while overclocking then you can retry overclocking it again.

 

[RickyT23]

The onboard sata controllers are consider part of the PCIE bus thats how they connect to the rest of computer so overclocking the bus too high could cause damage to the sata controllers also while overclocking make sure you didnt mess with the south bridge voltage it could cause harm to the controller as well. But it most likely was that you overclocked your ram too high when memory is overclocked too much funny stuff all ov er the computer will start happening drivers will crash files will become corrupted and yes hard drive will become very fragmented. So put your memory to its default settings as well as the rest of your overclock and defragment your drive also your registry will probably need cleaning as well too so get CCleaner and use its registry cleaner tool and its disk cleaner tool tool. Don't listen to ricky keep your ram at 1:1 ratio.

After you get all that in order then make sure you have full understanding of everything to do while overclocking then you can retry overclocking it again.

I am learning from you, thx

Also sorry to the original poster, I dont really know jack, lol!