First steps with UltraDefrag

Last updated on Apr 14, 2025

The latest version of UltraDefrag is well known for its ease of use. You can easily defragment all your disks with just a few clicks using an intuitive graphical interface. Follow this step by step guide to learn how to do it.

1. Double click the UltraDefrag icon on your desktop to open the program.
   

2. Check the drives list. It shows all the disks available for defragmentation. Removable disks, like USB sticks and memory cards, are excluded by default. If you want to include them to the list uncheck the Exclude removable media box. If you have connected a disk to your computer, but it didn’t show up in the list click the Refresh button to update the list.

   If you have multiple disks connected to your computer and they don’t fit all together into the list of disks due to space constraints you can use a scrollbar located on the right side of the list to scroll the list and thus access all your disks. Alternatively you can enlarge the list by dragging down its bottom border.

3. If some of your disks are incorrectly identified as SSD/HDD correct the detected disk types in SSD settings.

4. If some of the disks have a label saying Disk needs to be repaired, select the disks and click Repair to fix them.

5. Select the disks you want to defragment and click Analyze to perform their analysis first.

6. Check the analysis results.
   

   After the analysis the drives list displays the fragmentation level of the analyzed disks. To calculate the level UltraDefrag divides the number of loose fragments which belong to fragmented files and folders by the total number of fragments. The higher the level, the more fragments have files and folders on the disk and the worse is the disk performance.

   Below the drives list the program displays the cluster map of the selected disk. The top left cell represents the beginning of the disk, the bottom right – the end of the disk. All the cells in between are organized by rows.

   Each cell represents an integer number of clusters. If the total number of clusters on the disk cannot be divided by the number of cells without a remainder, a few last cells of the map will be unused.

   Colors are fully customizable. By default they have the following meaning:

   • Not fragmented files
   • Not fragmented folders
   • Fragmented files and folders
   • Locked files and folders

   • Master file table (MFT)
   • Space reserved for the MFT expansion
   • Unused map cells

   The free space gaps the program draws in white by default.

   Below the cluster map the program displays the statistics of the selected disk: the number of files and folders, the number of fragmented and locked files and the master file table size. The higher is the number of fragmented files, the worse is the disk performance.

7. Click Defragment to start defragmentation of the selected disks. You can pause and resume the process at any time using the Pause / Resume button. Also you can stop defragmentation by clicking the Stop button.

8. Check the results.
   

9. If some files are still fragmented, click Show report to open a file fragmentation report.
   

   The report shows the list of fragmented files. For each file it shows its number of fragments, its size and its full path. The comment column shows [DIR] for directories. The status column shows the reason why the file is still fragmented.

   Initially the files in the list are sorted by the number of fragments in descending order. To change the sorting order click the appropriate column header.

   To quickly check whether a specific file is fragmented or not, type its name into the Search box. As you type, the list of files will be filtered accordingly.

10. Check the status column of the list. If some files have an invalid status that means the file system has errors and needs to be repaired. Select the disk and click Repair to fix it first, then defragment the disk once again.

11. If some files have a move failed status that means the free space gaps they were supposed to get moved to were preoccupied by some other files during the defragmentation. To defragment such files just defragment the disk once again.

12. If you see that the $MFT file is still fragmented, click Optimize > Optimize MFT to optimize it. Depending on the system files layout on the disk the file might remain fragmented even after its optimization, but in most cases it will be fully defragmented or, at least, its fragmentation will be significantly reduced.

13. If you see that some files in the report have a locked status follow the locked files defragmentation instructions to defragment them.

14. If you see that some directories are still fragmented, it means that most likely the disk’s file system is FAT. Directories on the FAT-formatted disks cannot be defragmented due to a well known limitation of the FAT file system driver. However, you can easily optimize them.

15. All the remaining fragmented files require larger free space gaps to be defragmented. If you don’t have much free space on the disk perform a disk cleanup and then defragment the disk once again. If you have enough free space on the disk, however, but it is heavily fragmented perform a full optimization of the disk to consolidate the existing free space and get all the files fully defragmented.