Is there a way to guarantee that a file on Windows (using the NTFS file system) will use contiguous sectors on the hard disk? In other words, the first chunk of the file will be stored in a certain sector, the second chunk of the file will be stored in the next sector, and so on.
I should add that I want to be able to create this file programmatically, so I’d rather not just ask the user to defrag their harddrive after creating this file. If there is a way to programmatically defrag just the file that I create, then that would be OK too.
I would start here:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897428.aspx
and follow Mark’s documentation of the defrag stuff:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897427.aspx