"Your Computer Does Not Have Enough Free Memory to Defrag the Drive" Error Message

Symptoms

When you try to run Disk Defragmenter (Defrag.exe) or ScanDisk (Scandskw.exe), you may receive one of the following error messages:

-or-

Cause

This problem may occur if either of the following conditions is true:

• You are running Windows on a hard disk that is larger than 8 gigabytes (GB) and that has a cluster size that is smaller than 8 kilobytes (KB).
  
  This configuration may occur if you use a third-party disk tool to create a partition on a hard disk that is larger than 8 GB and that has a cluster size that is smaller than 8 KB.
  
  -or-

• You are running Windows on a very large hard disk that has a default Windows cluster size of 32 KB.

Resolution

To resolve these problems, upgrade your Windows operating system to Microsoft Windows XP or later.

Workaround

To work around these problems, do one of the following, as appropriate to your situation:

• Contact the manufacturer of the third-party hard disk tool for information about an update to the software that resolves this problem.
  
  For more information about hardware and software vendor contact information, visit the following Microsoft Web site:
  http://support.microsoft.com/gp/vendors

• Repartition your large hard disk into smaller partitions.
  
  For additional information, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:
  
  

  255867 How to Use the Fdisk Tool and the Format Tool to Partition or Repartition a Hard Disk
  
  

More Information

The standard FAT32 cluster size of 4,096 bytes applies only to hard disks that are smaller than 8 GB. The third-party hard disk tool may change the cluster size to 4,096 bytes per allocation unit.

The default cluster sizes are listed in the following table: