How to move the MTF Zone

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Guest

When formatting a hard drive in XP, NTF typically places the MFT zone about
3-5 GB from the beginning of the drive. A third-party defragger moved the
MFT zone further inside the disk. I now want to move it back to its original
location. Is this possible without reformatting the hard drive, and if so
how do I do it?

Thanks
Ken
 
Bob I said:
Perfect disk 7.0 makes this claim

"Places MFT according to Microsoft recommendations for improved performance

You will see a 5%-10% performance improvement over other defragmenters.
Microsoft has specific guidelines for placement of the MFT for this
improved performance, and only PerfectDisk follows these guidelines."
Click to expand...

That's the third party defragger that I had used. It moved the MFT zone 1/3
of the way into the inside of the disk. My disk is 250 GB, so the MFT zone
is now about 80 GB inside the disk. The distance from the MFT file to the
rest of my files is now farther than the entire hard disk size of most hard
disks! That’s the problem.

The actual Microsoft recommendation in the linked article is only 3-5 GB
inside the disk. Unfortunately, I didn’t fully grasp this problem until
after allowing PerfectDisk to move my MFT zone. So I want to move the MFT
zone back into that 3-5 GB area. In other words, I want to "undo" what
PerfectDisk did. Is there a registry entry, fsutil command, or anything else
I can try to get the built-in defragger to move the MFT zone back into this
area? I realize that reformatting is always an option, but I'm hoping
there's an easier way.

Ken
 
No tools with Windows that I know of let you do that. Sorry. Given the
size of that drive what about using Partition Magic (or like software)
to resize and make room for a second partition to move the files to, and
then reformat the "first" partition ?
 
Bob I said:
No tools with Windows that I know of let you do that. Sorry. Given the
size of that drive what about using Partition Magic (or like software)
to resize and make room for a second partition to move the files to, and
then reformat the "first" partition ?
Click to expand...

Hmm...that might be a good idea. I have Partition Magic, so maybe this is
the solution. Meanwhile, if anyone knows how to do this using native Windows
XP tools or methods, please let me know. :)
 
If you have Partition Magic - Convert the drive to FAT32 from
NTFS.Then just turn around and convert it back to NTFS. I
would make sure it's imaged as things of this type can sometimes
go badly. You'll have to uncompress the patches and DLLcache
folder or conversion will fail. It's likely you might run into the
"Sparse Data" error. Anyway it's an idea for you to consider.
 
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