Unmovable Clusters when defraging

[Warpspasm]

I use SystemSuite's defrag utility to optimize my drives. I had it run an analysis on my C drive and it came back with 5% fragmented files, so I decided to defrag it. The process only took a few minutes because so many clusters were listed as unmovable, there wasn't enough room to move the other clusters. At the end I still had 5% fragmentation. The unmovable clusters were scattered all over the drive. I've seen unmovable clusters before, but there were usually only a small amount and they tended to be in one area. What could have caused all of these unmovable clusters I have now and is there anyway to fix this?

Thanks.

 

[sturm]

Could be bad areas on the disk. Certain system files wont let you move them when windows is running.

 

[sarahm]

make sure you have all other programs closed during the defragging process.

 

[Warpspasm]

I did have everything closed, as far as I know. I really hope there isn't a problem with the disk. Nothing shows up as being bad when I run the disk fixer utility.

 

[Jaxon66]

i may be talkin outta my a$$ here but I remember back in the day that unmovable clusters maybe related to pagefiles related to system memory on disk?

your thoughts fellas?

😳

 

[Zoron]

The pagefile cannot be moved or defragged within Windows.... it must be done before Windows boots; ie a "Boot-time defragmentation".

Most popular defrag programs offer this: Diskkeeper, Perfectdisk, etc.

The file system cannot be defragged from within Windows either... so it sounds like it's time for a boot-time defrag.

 

[Warpspasm]

After seeing these unmovable files, I made it so the page file was located on my D drive instead of my C drive. I thought that might free up the unmovable files so they could now be moved. Nope, they still show up. System Suite does have the option to defrag the page file after a reboot, but that didn't seem to help. Actually, I haven't tried it since moving the page file to the other drive, but I would think the program will defrag the page file on the D drive and ignore the old one on C.

 

[Zoron]

Boot area can't be defragged, MFT or the MFT zone cannot be defragged and I believe the Metadata area can't be defragged either. These all have to be done before Windows loads.