Abstract
This study proposes a method to manipulate fragmentation of disks by arbitrarily allocating and releasing the status of a disk cluster in the NTFS file system. This method allows experiments to be performed in several studies related to fragmentation problems on disk cluster. Typical applicable research examples include testing the performance of disk defragmentation tools according to the state of fragmentation, establishing an experimental environment for fragmented file carving methods for digital forensics, setting up cluster fragmentation for testing the robustness of data hiding methods within directory indexes, and testing the file system's disk allocation methods according to the various version of Windows. This method suggests how a single file occupies a cluster and presents an algorithm with a flowchart. It raises three tricky problems to solve the method, and we propose solutions to the problems. Experiments for allocating the disk cluster to be fragmented to the maximum extent possible, it then performs a disk defragmentation experiment to prove the proposed method is effective.