HP/Compaq Laptops running XP Pro - hidden MFTs?

[KWW]

I am running XP Pro (SP2) on a fairly new HP (Compaq) 6220 laptop. When it
started slowing down a bit I installed Diskeeper Pro and looked at the MFT
and Swapfile analysis. I was surprised to see it register that the MFT was 0
in size. It made me wonder whether HP might have put the MFT in a special
memory chip on the motherboard or something. Maybe it was the way our IT
folks set it up .... anyway, I have not seen this before... wondered if
anyone else had. I have admin on the laptop.

Disk is only 65% full and has been defragmented.
All latest patches on system.
Have firewall(s), Symantec AV, and a couple of anti-spyware packages
installed. It is a subset of what I run on my other XP machines, so this
wouldn't slow it down that much.

TIA

 

[Mark Weinreb]

I am running XP Pro (SP2) on a fairly new HP (Compaq) 6220 laptop. When it
started slowing down a bit I installed Diskeeper Pro and looked at the MFT
and Swapfile analysis. I was surprised to see it register that the MFT was
0 in size. It made me wonder whether HP might have put the MFT in a
special memory chip on the motherboard or something. Maybe it was the way
our IT folks set it up .... anyway, I have not seen this before... wondered
if anyone else had. I have admin on the laptop.

Disk is only 65% full and has been defragmented.
All latest patches on system.
Have firewall(s), Symantec AV, and a couple of anti-spyware packages
installed. It is a subset of what I run on my other XP machines, so this
wouldn't slow it down that much.

TIA

The only way that you're going to have a zero-length MFT is if there isn't
one on the partition. And that is only possible if the partition is
formatted as FAT32 instead of NTFS. NTFS formatted partitions _must_ have
an MFT since it contains all the directory information for the partition, as
well as other information such as security descriptors.

So, the question should be: Why did your IT department lumber you with a
FAT32 formatted partition?

 

[KWW]

I double checked. It is NTFS. I wonder if there is a way to hid it so that
something like Diskkeeper cannot see it unless one is in possibly a local
admin mode or something. I had found it odd that it shows up as 0 in size
too.