how can i move all the files to the beginning of my hard drive?

[dirtybirdphoenix]

i want to partition my hard drive on my windows vista notebook but for some
reason there are some files in the middle of my hard drive. how can i move
all the files to the beginning of my hard drive? in doing so i will be able
to partition my hard drive and keep the system files seperate from my
personal files. i greatly appreciate any help anyone could give.

 

[Mike Hall - MVP]

Use of a program like Acronis Disk Director will do all of the messy stuff
for you..

http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/diskdirector/

 

[Rick Rogers]

Hi,

Either use a third party defrag program to move files that Vista's defrag
routing won't, or use a third party program to shrink the volume. Vista's
disk manager will not move files when shrinking a volume, it will stop when
it hits an unmovable file.

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP

Windows help - www.rickrogers.org
My thoughts http://rick-mvp.blogspot.com

 

[dirtybirdphoenix]

do you have any third party apps that you think i should use? i already use
auslogics disk defrag and it does a great job defraging but it doesn't move
everything to the front of the hard drive

 

[dirtybirdphoenix]

do you know of any programs that don't cost money? just thought i would check

 

[Mike Hall - MVP]

Use of a program like Acronis Disk Director will do all of that for you..

http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/diskdirector/

 

[Mike Hall - MVP]

Here is one free utility. It may work well, but don't take my word for it
because I have never used it.

http://www.cutepm.com/

Ensure that ALL files important to you have been saved to CD/DVD BEFORE you
start messing with partitions.

Also, ensure that you know how to do a full system recovery in the event
that it screws up.

 

[mayayana]

do you know of any programs that don't cost money? just thought i would check

I've been very happy with BootIt NG. (I originally
used the Powerquest products, but they were overpriced
and slow... and useless since Symantec "dotnetted"
them.)

You can use BootIt for partitioning on a trial basis.
(30 day trial.) The full cost is $35 and well
worth it. (And frankly, looking for freeware to do
such a low-level job seems a bit nutty to me.
Though there is an OS knock-off of Partition
Magic somewhere. I don't remember the name of
it offhand...and it may not handle NTFS.)

I use BootIt to multi-boot a number of
OSs and also use it to partition disks. It
can resize, delete, create, "slide", etc. The
only thing I'm not certain about is whether
it can resize an NTFS partition. It can create
them, but I don't think I've ever tried to resize.
If resizing of NTFS were not available you'd have
to just delete the partition, recreate a new set
of partitions, then re-install Vista. Be careful,
though, if you have a hidden restore partition
at the front of the disk. Unless you have a
dependable disk-image backup then you don't
want to erase that.

I haven't tried Acronis. It may work fine, but
it's quite a bit more expensive than BootIt, which
includes partitioning, boot manager, disk imaging,
etc. all in one program, while Acronis pulls the
Powerquest trick of splitting up the functions so
that many people will have to buy more than one
program.