Warp wrote:
>   I don't understand the problems I'm getting defragmenting.
> 
>   I'm trying to defragment my primary Windows partition, which is NTFS.
> It's failing to defragment one big file because there's "no space" for it.
> The file is about 1 GB in size, and there's over 9 GB of free space in the
> partition.
> 
>   The problem is that while defrag is defragmenting all the other files,
> for some reason it's only compacting *some* of the files to be at the
> beginning of the partition, but not others. The free space is scattered
> with tiny small files which the defragmenter is not compacting, even though
> it compacted other files just fine. The majority of the contents were nicely
> packed to the beginning of the partition, except for these hundreds of tiny
> files. And no, the tiny files are *not* marked as "unmovable". They are
> marked with the same color as all the other movable files.

That's pretty random - and dissapointing.

A few things to consider:

1. I wonder if this is related to the MFT reservation area?

2. You might try using the "contig" tool free from System Internals. It 
can be set to run during the boot sequence, so it has more or less 
exclusive access to the disk.

3. Having a 1GB file split into (say) 3 fragments probably won't have 
any measurable performance impact. It's when you have millions of 4KB 
fragments that you have a problem.

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