Files pertaining to the program are placed in many different locations. Moving or renaming these Windows program files and directories will almost certainly cause the program to fail. Disk fragmentation occurs when file clusters are spread non-contiguously on the disk. Fragmentation is not desirable because it slows disk access and makes file recovery more difficult. It can be improved in a number of ways.
Utility programs can defragment a disk quickly.
Also, reformatting a disk and copying the files to the disk will fix the problem. However, this is not a solution to hard disk fragmentation. The status report returns information on the total number of files, the total size of the disk, the space used and available, the fragmentation of a file, or group of files, the total amount of base memory and the amount available. This allows the user to look at the lost clusters and delete the information not wanted. FAT, lost clusters, cross-linked files, directory tree structure, bad clusters, various DriveSpace or DoubleSpace compressed disk drives.