While NTFS hit the scenes with the promise -- or rather the common misunderstanding -- that file fragmentation was a thing of the past, the reality we live with is copious fragmentation, significantly slowing many operations (NTFS is certainly better than FAT, but in no way does it eliminate fragmentation). Hard drives have gotten much bigger, and throughputs have increased significantly, but the time it takes to go from one file fragment to another has barely improved at all in over two decades.

While I sporadically use various defragmenting tools (including having PageDefrag in my startup), the optimal solution would be a bootable CD, allowing me to 100% error check and defragment entire volumes in one pass, as quickly as possible -- no contention over the device, and no files blocked from defragmentation (both of which cause online defragments to be incomplete, and terribly slow).

A Google search has turned up nothing of the sort (presumably the defragment/check utility would have to be Linux or *BSD based to have the operating system infrastructure available, while complying with license conditions. Such a utility could easily be included with a Knoppix or other bootable CD distribution), so I thought I'd throw this one out:

Anyone know of such a utility/bootable CD? Preferrably one that is trustworthy, and even commercial if that's the case. It'd be optimal if defragmentation could space-pack, preferrably with some sort of logic, such as putting bootup files in sequence and in the highest-throughput area of the drive, etc.