Well, no idea, I cannot understand more than half what you are reporting.
You seem like having a not fully formed idea of the concepts around unallocated (what you call free) space.
Each and every sector on a mass storage device can be allocated when a given set of indexing is parsed and at the same time be unallocated when another given set of indexing (file system reconstruction) is parsed.
jaclaz
Yes my apologies. I had conflated sectors with clusters and couldn't tell the difference when I typed the above. I was also looking at a flash drive with a file I thought should be in the middle sectors, but because I'd misunderstood clusters and sectors, didn't realise it was at the beginning of the flash drive, so when I saw it represented on defraggler as being at the start, thought defraggler couldn't read flash drives properly, maybe because of the file system it was using FAT32, or maybe because it was a flash drive storage instead of HDD. I had also recovered a previously deleted truecrypt container on said flash drive, through the file system only, with winhex, so I thought the recovered container was the one occupying the start of the flash drive as it was on an earlier cluster. But it had actually been mostly if not completely overwritten by the new container, so it's no surprise that none of the passwords I remember using worked. Anyways, I describe my present status in the other thread.