Disk defragmenting unmovable files

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X Donate Contact us. New posts Trending Search forums. What's new. New posts New profile posts Latest activity. Current visitors New profile posts Search profile posts Billboard Trophies. Defragment unmovable files on disk. Note: The 3 methods above are temporary steps. After shrinking your disk drive, do the steps again and enable all the options that we have disabled. Was this reply helpful? Yes No. Sorry this didn't help. Thanks for your feedback. We recommend that you perform all 3 methods before trying to shrink your disk drive.

Please ensure that after performing the shrink on your disk drive, you must enable all the options that we have disabled previously. High disk utility usage might cause slowness to your computer's performance. This thread is locked. You can follow the question or vote as helpful, but you cannot reply to this thread.

I have the same question Report abuse. Details required :. Very small files are often actually saved directly to the MFT. The MFT has a shadow or duplicate saved just in case the original gets damaged. When you save a file in FAT, it is saved to the first empty address; and if it takes up more than one they may not be contiguous Touching , next to each other,, sequential ; they could be at opposite ends of the drive, IE the file itself could be fragmented from the time it was saved.

When you save a file in NTFS, it looks for the first contiguous space large enough to hold the entire file.

But this means that there may be empty spaces on the drive which are more quickly accessible than where the file was saved. Thus while the file itself is not fragmented, the drive may become fragmented when you save a file. So, defragmentation is the act of moving files around so that neither the files nor the drive is fragmented.

Putting all the fragments of a given file in contiguous addresses and organizing the files in such a manner that there is as little wasted space between files on the fastest parts of the drive. Now we run into the first problem most people encounter. In FAT if a file is accessed, or saved while defragmentation is in progress, the whole process has to start over since it would be saved to the first empty space which is where defrag wants to move something.

But NTFS can just save it to the end and let defrag shuffle things around later. This is why generally we were advised to run disk defrag in safe mode in older operating systems using FAT format. But this does cause a few problems. Some areas are "off limits" things like your antivirus do not allow other things to write to spaces they reserve or alter their files, even temp ones.

There are many files which cannot be moved. We also run into the problem of how do you sort the files? Each defrag utility uses a different algorithm or method of calculting what goes where.

Do you sort by name alphabetically? By file type , OS first, Programs second, Data third? By frequency of use? A combination of the above?

How do things get sorted. And does the defrag utility run only when you launch it or do you allow it to run in the background on an NTFS system and "optimize the drive" doing mini defrags to put files which were saved in an incorrect area into a better position when it senses the hard drive is not being accessed?

So, it is normal to have some files show up as "unmoveable " when you run a defrag from within the windows environment. There are workarounds; some defrag utilities have the ability to run on the next boot, before windows loads from a "command prompt" type environment. Some of these things hibernation file for example, and system restore can be disabled for the purpose of defragmenting. SpeeDefrag is a simple program, that restarts your computer and runs defrag.

Once the defrag process has finished, it can optionally shut down your PC, otherwise reboot it. Manually disable the unmovable files As the tip given that you cannot shrink a volume beyond the point where an unmovable files are located, you need to manually remove the unmovable files.

After that, you should be able to shrink your partition with a larger amount of space. Directly shrink partition with unmovable files Do you think the previous method is too complicated?

In the next screen, drag the slider leftwards to shrink the partition. Conclusion This is the whole process of shrink volume with unmoveable files. Still Need Help? Have your problem been solved?