How many passes before defrag finishes?

7 passes in about 8 minutes on 1.5 TB HDD, although the HDD is only 65% full.

Windows 7 did 12 passes over 3 hours.

I'm on the 60th Pass on a 1 TB HD in about 3 hours.

I have a 750 gb drive that I just installed and imaged with the previous drive's information (OS/data/etc).  It seemed to be running especially slow with the new drive so I checked it's fragmentation status with Win7 (64 bit) defrag.  It said drive was 47% fragmented.  So I stated the defrag process about three hours ago and it is on Pass 8: 28%.   Yeesh.  Afraid to stop it at this point.  Passes 5 and 6 were REALLY fast.  Seven was slower and eight has been even slower. 

Any suggestions?

If you still have the previous drive with its data to hand, you could stop the process and in the worst case, re-image the drive if you've lost data, which isn't likely anyway.

But going back to page 1 of the thread, a third party defragmenter like Auslogics will simply run much faster and list what are the most fragmented files on the drive, which is what you need in a case like this...

No no no, auslogic and such things are voodoo snake oil.   Generally if it defrags faster it means one thing, it just means it sets the bar lower, what limits defrag speed is the rate of reading and writing a drive.  Reading and writing 750gb of data takes a LONG time, and thats assuming a perfect sorting algorithm.    "doneness" of defrag is a judgement call, at a certain point you get basically no real performance increase but you can ocd the drive and defrag it more tidy for many more hours of course.  Tests of auslogics and stuff against other defraggers don't show it performing any better in terms of results. 

Sometimes imaging programs if writing to fat drives or whatever can create fragmented images, at least thats what I've seen in complaints about macrium or whatever.  The fragmentation is real, and he just has to let the process run. To be honest the right way to do it if its that messed up is to do it at boot time, you can't defrag files being used by windows after all.  

Ultradefrag is free

http://ultradefrag.sourceforge.net/en/index.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UltraDefrag

UltraDefrag is an open-source disk defragmenting utility for Microsoft Windows. It is released under the GNU General Public License. The only other Windows-based defragmentation utility with a GNU GPL was JkDefrag (GPL version discontinued since 2008).

Features

• Defragments system files (registry, pagefiles...)
• Fast NTFS analysis compared to some^[which?]^ other products
• Fast and effective operation (completely defragments without additional passes)
• Safe operation to prevent file damage
• Ability to defragment single file/directory from the context menu in Explorer
• Ability to defragment Alternate Data Streams attached to NTFS files
• Ability to exclude any unimportant files based on flexible filters
• Ability to defragment files which have number of fragments above specified threshold
• Ability to automatically break defragmentation when the specified time interval elapses
• Human-readable HTML reports
• Powerful command line interface
• Ability to automatically hibernate/shutdown PC after a job
• Ability to make an automatic effective defragmentation through Windows Task Scheduler
• Multilingual graphical interface
• Small binaries (less than 1 MiB)
• Portable version available which requires no installation
• Native 64-bit support, including Intel Itanium support
• Open-source code licensed under the GNU General Public License

UltraDefrag uses Microsoft's defragmentation API and works on Windows NT, 2000, XP, Server 2003, Vista, and 7 operating systems. It supports FAT12, FAT16, FAT32, exFAT, and NTFS file systems. As of March 2013, Windows 8 was still not tested with UltraDefrag and the boot-time defragmentation utility did not work on Windows 8.

Let it defrag on boot and run that overnight.

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/the\_disk\_defrag\_difference?page=0,1

Auslogics was fast but managed to lower performance even.  So just stick with ultradefrag.  The comparison to vistas defrag no longer applies in that article though.