No defrag on files that admin hasn't permissions to

A

AndyMHancock

I'm running Windows 2000 Professional, SP4, and almost always use a
power user account. I mostly operate within a Unix environment
provided by Cygwin. In accordance with a common Unix practice, all my
power user files are set to be accessible by only the user. However,
this prevents those files from being defragged. After much searching
and experimentation, I found in JkDefrag's documentation that the
account under which defragging is run should have "full control" over
files being defragged.

I've tried the Win2K's built-in defragger, JkDefrag, and Ultra
Defragmenter (UD). For JkDefrag and UD, I also tried boot-time
defragging. UD requires specification of a comma-separated list of
file patterns, to which I added an asterisk (without quotes). None of
these help.

I confirmed that the fragmented files could be defragged after using
the Unix Bash command line interpeter in Cygwin to open up file access
to everyone ("go+rwx" in Unix lingo). Other people, however, haven't
needed to do this, including people who have finangled file access
permissions even more un-Windows-ily than I have. So I'm not sure
what could be the cause of the problem.

1. What other likely causes could there be?

2. Is there a defragger that is known to circumvent these file access
permissions problems? Freeware is preferrable, since this is an
ancient laptop for which investment is questionable. It might be
better to simply run it into the ground (or until my patience is
exhausted), then get a new laptop with twice the drive capacity I
need so that I can ghost the drive between two partitions instead
of this troublesome and nonideal defragging. On the current
laptop, ghosting might be problematic because it only has USB1
(haven't researched yet whether the CD burner is on IDE).

3. Failing that, is there a way to hierarchically traverse the C-drive
and set file permissions such that "full control" is given to
*only* admin?

Thanks!
 
A

AndyHancock

It turns out that Diskeeper managed to defrag the many user files that
the aforementioned free applications could not.
 

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