>>And, clearly, the defragger ought to be endowed with the logic to use the distributed fragmentation to build a contiguous space sufficient to then let it do the job it needs to do. At least when the free space percentage is better than, say 5% of the drive.
>
>Clearly. If this is what it seems, it indicates a serious limitation in the defragmenter.

I think the current defragmenter is just the same old Norton defragmenter which M$ bought for DOS 6 (and drastically reduced its set of features), and wasn't changed too much since. Unless changing for the worse counts.

In DOS 6, the defragmenter would consolidate free space. In Windows 9x, I think it still did that, don't remember for sure. Under NT (4.0, w2k, XP) it doesn't do that anymore. It seems to behave as a single-pass optimizer, does what it can, and leaves the rest intact. I often run it two or three times in a row just to consolidate the free space.

And I don't think this defragmenter is free - it comes as a computer management tool, ergo, a part of the OS. which is not free.