UltraDefrag is an open source disk defragmenter for Windows NT 4.0 and later operating systems. It makes use of the same defragmenting API used by many other windows defrag utilities, both open and closed source. However, UltraDefrag has two features that make it unique. The first is that it has a kernel mode driver that does most of the work. The second is the ability to run the application at boot up time in a manner similar to chkdsk. This allows for faster defragmentation time and the ability to defragment all files including system files.
UltraDefrag supports the following filesystems FAT12/16/32, NTFS and on Vista UDF. UDF is a file system intended for optical media such as DVDs that unlike ISO9660, is rewriteable. It has also the ability to defragment volumes at boot time allowing you to move many system files that are always locked by the operating system. Currently all files besides the registry hives and the pagefile can be scanned at boot time. UltraDefrag can also defragment files and folders compressed by NTFS file system compression. And can even defragment floppies, although doing so is not particularly useful.
UltraDefrag binaries are available for the 32 bit and all 64 bit versions of Windows.
You can download the latest installer for UltraDefrag at the project homepage (http://ultradefrag.sourceforge.net/). Simply download and run the installer. No reboot is required.
SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS:
Note that you must be an administrator to install and run UltraDefrag.
If you have problems with configuration files editing, use the following menu in Explorer Tools > Folder options > File types and associate 'lua' and 'cfg' extensions with your preferred text editor.
IMPORTANT:
The console application is called udefrag.exe. It is placed in system32 directory by the installer. Therefore you can call it from the command line or run box.
Console Application after a successful analyze run.Command promptMicrosoft Windows XP [5.1.2600] (C) Microsoft Corporation, 1985-2001. C:\>udefrag -a c:UltraDefrag v1.1.0 console interface Copyright (c) Dmitri Arkhangelski, 2007. Volume information: Volume size = 3.92 Gb Free space = 917.56 Mb Total number of files = 14688 Number of fragmented files = 126 Fragments per file = 1.21C:\>_
The command line version takes one of three switches and a drive letter. The switches are as follows:
In addition the following switches can be used when defraging and compacting. They override the settings in the udefrag.cfg file described below. The default settings are set at compile time.
Specifying just the drive letter will cause UltraDefrag to defragment the drive. When the operation finishes or you stop the program with a Ctrl+C, the program will display the results to the console. If you abort the operation with Ctrl+C or close the shell window, UltraDefrag will exit safely without destroying any data.
The console application is also used as context menu handler. When you right click drive/folder/file icon in Explorer you can select [--- Ultra Defragmenter --] item to defragment selected file.
You can use the console application in batch files. Par example, you would like to shutdown your system after defragmentation. Store the following code into one file with .cmd extension and click it's icon to start batch processing:
@echo off udefrag c: > c:\ud.log udefrag d: >> c:\ud.log shutdown -s -t 00Batch files are powerful enough, try to insert commands to play sounds after each defragmentation. If you doubt that your volumes are in good state then add chkdsk command too.
To get list of available volumes type udefrag -l. Each line of output contains volume letter, type of file system, total size and percent of free space. Here is an example:
Command promptMicrosoft Windows XP [5.1.2600] (C) Microsoft Corporation, 1985-2001. C:\>udefrag -lUltraDefrag v1.4.0 console interface Copyright (c) Dmitri Arkhangelski, 2007.Volumes available for defragmentation: C: NTFS 3.92 Gb 6 % D: NTFS 9.42 Gb 3 % E: FAT32 59.30 Gb 5 %C:\>_
The windows application is a simple application with one main form of fixed size and an about box. An illustration of the window as well as an explanation of their functionality is below:
List of volumes. This list all drives on the machine that you can scan. CDROM's and other drives that cannot be defragmented are excluded from list automatically. If the 'Skip removable media' box is checked, also floppies and other similar devices will be excluded. This list has the following fields:
Volume - drive letter plus file system type in square brackets. There are used
two types of icons in this field:
for fixed drives and
for removable media.
Status - a description of the action being performed (Analyze, defrag, etc).
Total space
Free space
Percentage - percent free.
Skip Removeable Media Checkbox
Cluster Map This is a color coded representation of all drives. Here is colors explaination:
Some of the categories on the legend have a lighter and darker color on them. The lighter colors represent files below the file size threshold, and the darker colors represent files above the threshold if one is set.
Rescan Drives (Ctrl+R) This button will recheck all volumes in the system to see if some were added or removed.
Buttons
The following section explains the buttons along with listing their
shortcut keys.
Analyze (Ctrl+A) Scans the currently selected drive to determine how fragmented it is.
Defrag (Ctrl+D) Exactly what it says.
Compact (Ctrl+C) Moves all files to the beginning of the partition, defragmenting them if possible. The compact command does not work on volumes with the FAT filesystem because you cannot move directories on them.
Pause (Ctrl+P) Stops the currently running analyze or defrag operation. This behavior is the same as stop.
Stop (Ctrl+S) Stops the currently running analyze or defrag operation.
Fragmented (Ctrl+F) Display a report of all fragmented files on the system. This report is very small but useful. It is generated by the driver, so all versions of UltraDefrag generate it.
Settings (Ctrl+T) Displays the Settings Dialog. The settings dialog has three buttons as shortcuts to main options, report options and this User Manual. The settings stored in files override the settings hardcoded into the executable at compile time (in "src\dll\udefrag\settings.c").
About (F1) Displays the simple about box containing copyright notice and links to most important information about program.
Progress bar This displays the progress of the currently running analyze, compact or defrag task. Note that selecting a different volume will cause this bar to disappear.
UltraDefrag also includes a new mode that allows you to run it at boot time in a manner similar to chkdsk. This is known as a native application.
Boot time settings may be specified in the gui. You may schedule a boot time scan for the next reboot, or at every reboot. The only restriction on boot time scans is that you may not scan encrypted volumes. This is because lsass.exe, the component of the operating system that reads encrypted volumes, is loaded after the native executable runs.
To change boot time options properly you should follow these instructions:
Everytime you run analyze, compact or defragment, a report of all files on the file system is created. This report has the following fields.
Number of fragments.
Filename
Comment This can be blank or contain one of three values:
[OVR] File is above the size threshold.
[DIR] Object is a directory.
[CMP] Compressed file.
To change items sorting click top link on the preferred column. Note that it's a slow process - about 1.5 seconds for 550 items on 1.8GHz CPU. Sorting implemented in JavaScript is slow, but very reliable.
The command line version of UltraDefrag may be run out of system scheduled tasks. The process of adding a scheduled task instance of UltraDefrag is simplified throuth a utility called UltraDefrag Scheduler.NET. This small application requires Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 to run. The simple gui has 4 settings.
They are stored in udefrag.cfg file located in %windir%\UltraDefrag\options directory. This is just a simple text file with comments and parameter-value pairs. Note please that it must be saved in Unicode (UTF-16) encoding. On all supported systems built-in Notepad can be used as editor.
The strings with a semicolon (;) or # characters in the beginning are comments. Here is a complete example:
; !!! NOTE: THIS FILE MUST BE SAVED IN UNICODE (UTF-16) ENCODING !!! ;------------------------------------------------------------------- ; ; Filter ; ; 1. Enter multiple filter match strings separated ; by the semicolon (;) character. Note that filter ; is case insensitive. ; 2. You can specify maximum file size with the ; following suffixes: Kb, Mb, Gb, Tb, Eb, Pb. ; 3. The patterns you supply for the include and exclude ; functionality applies to the whole path. For example, ; if you specify 'temp' in the exclude path you would ; exclude both the temp folder (WINDIR\temp) and ; the internet explorer temporary files folder. ; Filter strings cannot be longer than 4096 bytes. ; ;------------------------------------------------------------------- INCLUDE = EXCLUDE = system volume information;temp;recycler SIZELIMIT = 126 Pb ;------------------------------------------------------------------- ; ; Boot time settings ; ; 1. Enter multiple filter match strings separated ; by the semicolon (;) character. Note that filter ; is case insensitive. ; 2. The volume letters must be either separated ; by semicolons (;) or don't contain any separators ; between. ; 3. Set NEXT_BOOT/EVERY_BOOT to YES/NO ; to chose when to defragment. ; ;------------------------------------------------------------------- BOOT_TIME_INCLUDE = windows;winnt;ntuser;pagefile;hiberfil BOOT_TIME_EXCLUDE = temp LETTERS = CLD NEXT_BOOT = NO EVERY_BOOT = YES ;------------------------------------------------------------------- ; ; Main report settings. ; ; 1. Set ENABLE_REPORTS parameter to YES/NO state ; to enable/disable HTML reports. ; 2. Set DBGPRINT_LEVEL = NORMAL to view useful ; messages about the analyse or defrag progress. ; Select DETAILED to create a bug report to send ; to the author when an error is encountered. ; Select PARANOID in extraordinary cases. ; Of course, you need have DbgView program or ; DbgPrint Logger installed to view logs. ; ;------------------------------------------------------------------- ENABLE_REPORTS = YES DBGPRINT_LEVEL = NORMAL ;------------------------------------------------------------------- ; ; Other settings ; ; Specify the map update interval in milliseconds. ; ;------------------------------------------------------------------- MAP_UPDATE_INTERVAL = 500
They are stored in udreportopts.lua file located in %windir%\UltraDefrag\options directory. This is just a simple text file (in ANSI encoding) with comments and parameter-value pairs. However it's a real program written in Lua language.
The strings with -- character sequence in the beginning are comments. Here is a complete example:
--------------------------------------------------------------------
-- Ultra Defragmenter report options
--------------------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------------------------
-- I. Output Formats
--------------------------------------------------------------------
produce_html = 1
--------------------------------------------------------------------
-- II. HTML specific options
--------------------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------------------------
-- Generally ASCII renders better in Internet Explorer and
-- UTF-16 renders better in FireFox. UTF-16 is of course required
-- to properly render Asian characters such as Japanese and Chinese.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
use_utf16 = 0
--------------------------------------------------------------------
-- Set enable_sorting to zero if your web browser is too old
-- and you have error messages about ivalid javascript code.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
enable_sorting = 1
--------------------------------------------------------------------
-- Set this parameter to 1 if you prefer to look at filenames
-- splitted into few short lines. If you prefer to use fullscreen
-- mode of your web browser then set this parameter to zero.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
split_long_names = 1
--------------------------------------------------------------------
-- Set here maximum number of characters per line
-- in filename cells.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
max_chars_per_line = 50
--------------------------------------------------------------------
-- This stylesheet is used to set styles for various
-- report elements.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
style = [[
<style>
td {font-family: monospace; font-size: 10pt}
.c {text-align: center}
.f {background-color: #000000; color: #FFFFFF}
</style>
]]
title_tags = {
open = "<pre><h3>",
close = "</h3></pre>"
}
--------------------------------------------------------------------
-- Main report table properties.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
table_style = [[
border="1" color="#FFAA55" cellspacing="0" width="100%"
]]
The actual work of moving files to different clusters is performed through the windows API. What makes UltraDefrag superior to the standard windows defrag utility is that it uses its own algorithm to determine where to place files. Also, the actual work is done by the kernel driver ultradfg.sys. This enhances performance because there is no constant switching between user mode and kernel mode.
The latest sources for UltraDefrag is available via subversion.
The url is
https://ultradefrag.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/.
The program is written in C. The code is very clear and
understandable. Detailed compilation instructions are located in
INSTALL.TXT file in /src
subdirectory of the source code.
Please report all problems and bugs via the sourceforge bug tracker.
NOTE: Please include the following data in your bug report:
 |
 |
|