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So basically I have a drive that I've tried to clean up, but I still cannot get enough continuous space on it for files to defragment properly, so can I use another drive with a lot of extra space to rearrange the files so that they can then be copied back to the defragging drive as contiguous files?

If I can, how would I be able to do this?

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    why the hassle, move some stuff temporarily off that hard drive, defraggle it and then move the files back.
    – Molly7244
    Dec 15, 2009 at 5:13
  • Interesting idea Dennis, but I agree with Molly. The end result is the same, the process is similar. Only difference is the amount of hassle setting it up. Dec 15, 2009 at 5:23
  • Take the sane route that Molly suggested
    – Tyler
    Dec 15, 2009 at 5:49

3 Answers 3

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NTFS is fairly good at keeping files contiguous if:

  • the drive is big enough
  • the files are copied over onto a freshly formatted disk

So I would do what Molly suggested in the comments: move the pr0n and videos to the other, bigger drive (which will be reasonably contiguous), defrag the main drive with Defraggler, and move them back again (though I wouldn't even bother moving them back if the second drive is a permanent solution).

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If you are willing to try an alternative defragmenter, download the trial version of Diskeeper. It defrags with as less as 1% free space.

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I had a similar problem recently with a drive that was completely full and would not boot.

I mounted the drive in another machine and moved (hidden) Uninstall directories and service pack files from C:\windows to another drive, which gave enough free space to boot. Then, I used Cleanup! to clean out IE caches (amazingly, there were still caches for old versions of IE), disabled hibernation and moved the swap file to another drive. Defragged, updated and ghosted.

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