[Gllug] [Not really OT, honestly] Forcing Vista to defrag properly

[John Winters]

At first glance this would seem to be an OT question, but it's very 
relevant to Linux.

I've just bought a new laptop and I'm afraid it has Vista on it (because 
it would have cost me more to buy it without).  It runs Ubuntu 
beautifully from live CD, including sound, Wifi and speed scaling.

Obviously I want to put Linux on it (Debian Etch or Lenny) but I'd quite 
like to keep Windows around in a small partition in order to be able to 
do things like BIOS upgrades.  I've been burnt before with a Linux-only 
laptop which needs a BIOS upgrade.

In order to shrink the Vista partition I need to get it to defrag 
thoroughly, but the Vista defragger seems to be even worse than the XP 
one.  It's bigger drawback is it won't tell you what the current state 
of the disk is - or at least, only very superficially.  With XP you 
could see the layout of free space and at least make a guess at what 
needed to be moved or removed.  Vista has gone all quiet and won't pass 
on this information.

Anyone know of a good way to force Vista to do a complete defrag?  I'm 
on the point of firing up fdisk and blowing it away.

TIA,
John
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