Perform Disk defragmentation On Multiple Hard Drives At Once In Windows

Windows XP does not include a way to defragment all hard drives at the same time, which is hard when we have more than one hard drive in our computer.

The technique we are going to use is by creating a batch file to defragment all of the drives, one after the other.

The disk defragmentation utility in Windows XP can be triggered from the command line with the following syntax:

Windows Disk Defragmenter
Copyright (c) 2001 Microsoft Corp. and Executive Software International, Inc. Usage:
defrag [-a] [-f] [-v] [-?]
volume drive letter or mount point (d: or d:\vol\mountpoint)
-a Analyze only
-f Force defragmentation even if free space is low
-v Verbose output
-? Display this help text

First, we’ll create a file named defragmentall.bat, and place it anywhere you like, as long as you’ll remember where it is. If you want to run it from the command line, you could place it in the \windows directory so that it will be available in the system path.

For each hard drive, add a line to the batch file. For instance, if we want to defragment drives C: , D: , and F: we will add these three lines:

defrag c: -f
defrag d: -f
defrag f: -f

To run the defrag, just either double-click on the batch file or start it from the command line.