System files from the loading of the operating system...they are there due to the path in which they were installed and the OS relies on knowing they are exacly in the same place.

It's nothing to worry about as the defrag never really shows you a contiguous hard drive image. It's based more upon type of data more so then the actual layout of the drive.

The best thing is when you first install an OS...defrag right away! When you do any installations or changes afterwards..defrag again!

HTH

Opus :D

Hey Roly,

First and formost what operating system?

Secondly... unmovable files are usually system files that the OS and its programs needs to run and are kept in certain sectors of the hard drive for faster access.

That is (from my understanding) what those files are.

Disclaimer: I am by no means a computer expert although some friends of mine who are say I know just enough to get in trouble.lol

Best wishes,

JD( o}===;;;

Hi JD
It's XP Home
thanks Roly

Just for completeness sake, it also has to do with the fact that a lot of OS files are being used and as such are "locked" during operation. They simply can not be "lifted and moved" elsewhere while Windows is running. One example (and usually a good size file) is Windows Virtual Memory allocation.

This is also one of the reasons why Disk Image programs (DriveImage) insist on running in DOS mode when creating an image of the boot hard disk ...

MisterBlue.

DOS boot up files used to require the IO.SYS and MSDOS.SYS files start at the top of the disk. This is because the BIOS bootstrap code loads the first sector from the disk, then jumps to a specific offset in that loaded sector to continue executing the boot process.

Newer DOS operating systems, Win9x, etc, don't have this limitation. The boot sector is always at the 1st sector, and can point to where the DOS system files reside on the disk itself.

If you want to defrag for performance, use Norton Speed disk, and do ****.exe, dll, vxd, com, hlp, chm, drv, cat, sys, inf all moved to the front of the disks. These files are not changed (written to), so they will never become fragmented during use.

Move ****.tmp, ~*.*, *.~m, etc, to the end of the disk. These are the generic forms of temp files that Windows opens and closes constantly during normal operation.

The ****.* syntax is specific to SpeedDisk under W2k and XP. It is different under Win9x.

Also move the directories to the top of the disk... faster access.

Use a fixed (non-variable) size for the swap file. SD will defrag the swap file (Win9x), and it won't get scattered all around the disk. SD moves it to the top of the disk, if set to a fixed size.