Setting MFT zone on non-system drive

I guess I don't understand what you're asking. The MFT

will/should grow as needed, and running chdsk /f should correct

disk space if required (fairly rare). Are you actually having

problems with the MFT, or are you just curious about what you

are seeing? Using a third party tool, like Perfect Disk, will

change the size of the metadata file as it is capable of

removing the free space. It should not be a concern if there is

only minimal free space showing under these circumstances.





Bill Woods wrote:



The MFT Zone does not seem to the right size and it is not

growing either. :-(





On 21 Feb 2005, Al Dykes wrote:



How did you discover this ?









Hello Al (and maybe Rick too). Here is some more detailed info about my
situation.



I have stored some screenshots of my partitions in a 525 KB zip file which I
have uploaded to http://tinyurl.com/5r6ja.



The zip contains screenshots of my C, D, N and R partitions. Get the zip
and have a look at it and I will talk you through the screen shots below.



--------- see zip file



The main screenshot of each partition is in GIF's called C+0, D+0, N+0 and
H+0.



Extra data is in the small statistics window. I show two tabs of the
statistics window for each partition and the screenshots are called C+1,
C+2, D+1, D+2, N+1, N+2, H+1 and H+2.



The following is some background info about each of the four partitions C,
D, N and H:





PARTITION D



D is a 39 GB data partition. D was defragmented immediately before this
screenshot was taken.



The problem is that D's MFT occupies almost all of MFT Zone. In fact there
is no separate square showing the MFT Zone. Note also that MFT Zone is less
than 12.5% of the partition.



This is the partition I am worried about and am writing to ask about. It
seems to me that any moment now I am going to find that the MFT runs out of
space because XP did not (a) allocate even the minimum 12.5% space to the
MFT Zone to start with and (b) XP might also not extend the MFT Zone when
the MFT actually does run out of space.





PARTITION N



By contrast, N is a 46 GB partition onto which I copied most (but not all)
of D's contents to.



The size of the MFT in N is more or less the same size as the MFT in D. And
so is the size of the metadata. But N has a large MFT Zone whereas D has
almost nothing. This suggests there is something wrong with D.





PARTITION C



Just for comparison purposes I am including the 11.5 GB system partition C.
It was defragmented a few days before the screenshot and the defrag included
a boot-time defrag of the system files. Again the MFT has a lot of space to
grow into. (The black paging file seems to have been moved by the boot-time
defrag from the middle of the data space to where it is now.)





PARTITION H



Finally, as a second example of a data drive maintained by this same XP
system, there is the H partition which is 74 GB and that is about double the
size of the D partition. Partition H contains largely static data which in
the past would have been archived to tape but which I keep on this partition
in the PC for convenience. It has smaller files than the D drive and it has
almost no files as large as the average on D. H has an MFT and it also has
spare space in its MFT Zone approximately equal in size to the MFT.



So, as I asked originally - how can I increase the MFT zone on the D drive?
Is there a registry setting or can I use XP's "fsutil" or maybe something
else to do it?



--



(Additional group added: comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage)

"Bill Woods" wrote in message
anews.com...

So, as I asked originally - how can I increase the MFT zone on the D drive?
Is there a registry setting or can I use XP's "fsutil" or maybe something
else to do it?

I have noticed in on Win2K using sysinternals.com's ntfsinfo.

When ever usage goes above 87.5%, the MFT zone is used to store data and on
reboot the MFT zone is smaller. For whatever reason, the MFT zone does not go
back to 12.5% when you decrease usage.

The only real problems is when MFT becomes very fragmented. On data partitions
this is rarely a problem, because the MFT is very small.

Did you find the Microsoft KB article on increasing the MFT zone size?

"Bill Woods" wrote in message

So, as I asked originally - how can I increase the MFT zone on the D
drive?
Is there a registry setting or can I use XP's "fsutil" or maybe
something
else to do it?

"Eric Gisin" wrote

I have noticed in on Win2K using sysinternals.com's ntfsinfo.

Hi Eric, I downloaded the tool you mentioned and I got the same results as
my GIFs show.

http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/source/ntfsinfo.shtml

It says to be careful on NTFS on Win NT 5.0 (= Win 2000) unless you are
administrator. I don't know but maybe XP has the same requirements. I have
in fact been using the admin account.



When ever usage goes above 87.5%, the MFT zone is used to store data and
on
reboot the MFT zone is smaller. For whatever reason, the MFT zone does not
go
back to 12.5% when you decrease usage.


And Microsoft says that in fact the MFT Zone should be increasing!
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/d...c_fil_xhpo.asp

That is my problem because I reckon that if I do not force the MFT Zone to
get bigger then I will run out of space.

Do you know what happens at that point?
Can I still boot?
Can I boot the recovery CD and use that to repair the problem? (Even
though it is the D drive.)
This is the sort of thing it could be important to know for someone in my
situation!


The only real problems is when MFT becomes very fragmented. On data
partitions
this is rarely a problem, because the MFT is very small.


I use PerfectDisk to defrag the system files and it seems to do a good job.
I think System Internals have a free utility to do something similar,


Did you find the Microsoft KB article on increasing the MFT zone size?


Do you mean the one I have linked to above?