Yes, it is quite normal, if you have very little free space on that drive. Try deleting or moving some data off it before defraging.
When I defragment my drive, I usually try to leave no less than 10-20% of it free.
ED: As others have noted, you can try cleaning up temporary files, reducing space reserved for system restore or virtual memory. But I personally preferred not to spend time freeing some space bit by bit, when I had the same problem. Just find a few big files and drop them off onto another partition/HDD/DVD-RW.
About using other defragmenters: I've tried a few (O&O Defrag, Defraggler and etc.) and did not notice any significant improvement in speed over the default one. Some of them do offer different options, like ordering defragged files by how often you use them, size, folder structure and whatnot, that supposedly improves performance. But that improvement (if there is any) is hardly noticeable. So I prefer to stick with that old defragmenter instead of installing some additional cr... ahem, software - it just works.
You could try using CCleaner to get rid of unnecessary temporary files and other Windows junk before doing a defrag. – Umber Ferrule – 2009-09-18T10:05:21.613
And Defraggler, from the same people who make CCleaner, can defrag faster than XP's default defragger, but you definitely need to free some space. – None – 2009-09-18T10:09:37.893