XP Fragmentation issue

[- Bobb -]

Occasionally when I check my disk I'll see info such as
334 fragments / and the file is only the size of a few sectors (say 512kb) -
how can that be ?
I think it's been a .log file everytime ( name varies - might be Avast or a
system log but it's like one character only per sector )
Anyone else notice this ?
And I can never mess with the file because it's open. So I ignore it, but
just if it's just my pc ? If not, how to get around it so that a 2 mb log
doesn't have 1000 pointers.

 

[Paul]

Occasionally when I check my disk I'll see info such as
334 fragments / and the file is only the size of a few sectors (say 512kb) -
how can that be ?
I think it's been a .log file everytime ( name varies - might be Avast or a
system log but it's like one character only per sector )
Anyone else notice this ?
And I can never mess with the file because it's open. So I ignore it, but
just if it's just my pc ? If not, how to get around it so that a 2 mb log
doesn't have 1000 pointers.

You can't fix that, because the logging program is set to use "append" mode
on the file. Which means the write pointer is placed at the end of the file,
and new log entries are added. (You would have to rewrite the program,
to change the behavior.)

For your file to be as fragmented as you describe, you must have originally
had a FAT32 partition, and used the "convert" utility to change it to NTFS.
I think that gives a tiny cluster size, like 512 bytes. And gives the
potential for high fragment counts.

Paul