i have window's xp home edition?

Question

when i defrag my disk drive the blue portion's are contiguous files . What are Contiguous files?

Answer 1

Contiguous files are files that are organized optimum on the hard disk. i.e. all portion of the files are correctly organized on the hard disk.

Suppose there are 3 files (each having 5 portion or parts as organized on disk as):-
file1 - 11111
file2 - 22222
file3 - 33333

Contiguous files will be organized on hard disk as:-
111112222233333
Fragmented files will be organised on hard disk as:-
112231223331123

Answer 2

Contiguous simply means they are located next to each other. In other words, portions of an individual file gets spread across your hard disk drive. Strangely enough, a file is not stored in one location. Each bit of a file can be at opposite ends of the drive. This is why it is called "fragmented". When you "de"fragment your drive, the utility grabs these bits and brings them back together, into a contiguous block. It takes several similar files and places them together. This speeds up the process of the OS going to get the file(s) when you make a request, such as an Open request. The items in your "documents" folder are not really stored in a folder like that on your hard disk. Instead, the folder only represents a visual of our data files. It is odd, but there you have it, it is what it is. I don't know why it works this way, only that it does. This is also why we have a Prefetch. A folder which contains the most used portions of a program, so when we open that program it grabs these most used files, compiles it quickly and while we use it finishes up compilation of the program. Even though it appears that the program is fully "there", it truly isn't. Only after a moment or two, much shorter than the mere seconds it first appears on screen. This is basically the same premise for data and multimedia files.

Good luck and have a nice evening.

Answer 3

Defrag takes all the files and places them one after the other with no spaces in between, to free up a large portion of the hard drive. The files thus become "contiguous" files - all together with no break in between.

Answer 4

This had been asked:

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20061216235027AAnGVTD

As you can imagine, after repeated saving/deleting, installing/uninstalling, a file or folder may not necessarily be saved in a single space on a disk but in first available space.

A file with all its parts stored in one location on a disk is described as "contiguous." If a file is not contiguous, it's fragmented; broken into pieces that are scattered throughout the disk.

Answer 5

Contiguous files are those that are already "Defraged" The goal of defrager is to take all of the misplaced files on your computer accumulated from deletes, installs, etc. and remove them to free up space, or put them in their place. Contiguous files are those that aren't misplaced, and are already right where they need to be.

Answer 6

A file on disk that is not broken apart. All sectors are adjacent to each other. A contiguous file is faster to read and write than one that is fragmented across the disk.
http://www.answers.com/topic/contiguous-file