Unused vs Shrink Available

[BobH]

I have a lot of unused space on my internal 1TB hard drive on this HP laptop. Because I'm having trouble setting up an external USB HDD, I thought I'd look at partitioning the internal drive to create a web development partition for XAMPP and Wordpress. The screenshot below shows that 83% or 749GB of the C: drive is free. Shrink available shows 199GB.

Why such a difference between unused and available-to-shrink values? The C: drive shows 0% fragmented when I looked at defrag so fragmentation shouldn't account for the difference, should it?

Shrink Available vs Unused 2023-07-25_17h11_29.png

[JoeP]

Your clue is in the information message. There are files stored that are designated as unmovable. If one or more files are unmovable you can't make that partition any smaller than where the files are located.

[BobH]

Thanks, Joe.

Now, what makes a file unmovable? Can the user change it?

Off to do some research.

[BobH]

I got this changed. I assigned 250 GB to the C: drive and followed an article that allowed me to delete the unmovable files (or at least get them out of the way). I then created a partition that uses about half the available terabyte on the internal drive. Before I did anything Windows reported 0% fragmentation but DeFraggler reported 30+% fragmentation. I took the time overnight to defrag the drive.

Thanks to everyone for the help.

Now on to recreating file search indexes.