Defra & immovable clusters?

[Dinosaur]

I am running Windows 98 SE with Fat32 partitions.

When defragging, I notice a lot (perhaps 20-50) clusters tagged as "will not be moved." It is not really important, but I am curious.

Some are isolated, some are in groups of 3-6 contiguous clusters.

What could these immovable clusters be? They must be allocated for some system data.

Might clusters be allocated as required for the file directory, resulting in small isolated groups? I assume that contiguous clusters are allocated to the FAT when a drive is formatted, and that Defrag does not even display data about the FAT clusters

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Gouverneur
Eschew Obfuscation!
If one hundred million people believe a foolish idea, it is still a foolish idea.

[tjaymadison]

Some SW installs 'stake out' a cluster location for a reason I was never
clear on. Perhaps for speed, so they always know where to find something?

Norton Speed Disk has an option to 'relocate' them, but I never tried it.

The FAT does assign contiguous clusters when it can, but after deletes and
uninstalls this quickly becomes impractical. It also tries to protect you
from yourself, in a sense. It starts at the beginning of a chain, but also
doesn't use the most recently freed-up clusters right away, in case you
change your mind and want to recover something you erased earlier.

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"I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."
-- Charles Babbage, mathematician, computer pioneer, analytical engine designer (1791-1871)
-- (Question: 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?')

"Just because I don't care, doesn't mean I don't understand."
-- Homer Simpson

[This message has been edited by tjaymadison (edited 06-08-2001).]

[yawningdog]

I always thought that these chunks of space had to do with the low level format and other such mundane data. Have I been wrong?

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Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler.