when we use disk defragmenter in windows, some portions are shows as 'unmovable files'. what are these?

Question

in windows xp disk defragmenter these are shown in green. are they just the pagefile or any other files too? if yes, then which?

Answer 1

Swapfiles can constitute large portions of "unmoveable" files on your disk. Because a computer not only needs to know what data to store, but where (what use is knowing data unless you know where to find that data when it is stored?), the file is made unmoveable, to preserve links to appropriate places in memory and your files.

Other files can include essential windows files (those awful .DLL files and .SYS files, and especially VXD files, or drivers), where Windows hasn't been programmed to let you specify where they should go. These all add up to unmoveable files, and are best left untouched for good reasons. It may seem unflexible, but thinking about it, I'd rather windows knows where to look, instead of being diredcted to a possibly corrupt or virus-filled file.

Have a look in the root of your Windows drive (Usually "C:\") for a very large file (200MB up to several gigabytes), that's your swapfile, and can't be moved easily.

Finally, here's an excert from the defragmenter help files:

"On volumes formatted with the NTFS file system, Windows reserves a portion of the free space called the master file table (MFT) Zone, as a space where the MFT can grow. Windows stores all the information necessary to retrieve files from the volume in the MFT.

Disk Defragmenter cannot move files to the MFT Zone because it is reserved by Windows. However, Windows allows other files to be saved in the space reserved for the MFT Zone when no other disk space is available."

Hopefully this helps.

Answer 2

they are usually the page file and the hibernation files...if you want to defrag the page file go here: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/Utilities/PageDefrag.mspx