Setting MFT zone on non-system drive

[Bill Woods]

I keep my data on my D drive which is starting to get full (30GB used
out of 35GB). The MFT on this D drive has almost completely filled
the MFT zone.

How can I increase the MFT zone on the D drive?

Is there a registry setting or can I use fsutil to do it?

 

[Rick \Nutcase\ Rogers]

Hi Bill,

You shouldn't need to do anything, the MFT exands as files are added. To
compact unused space (resulting from files that have been removed), you
would need a third-party defragging utility, as the native defrag utility
will not do this. Keep in mind also that the defrag routine will need free
space of ~15% to run properly, so do not load the drive too full (keep it
under 31GB).

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP

Associate Expert - WindowsXP Expert Zone

Windows help - www.rickrogers.org

 

[Bill Woods]

Hi Bill,

You shouldn't need to do anything, the MFT exands as files are
added. To compact unused space (resulting from files that have
been removed), you would need a third-party defragging utility,
as the native defrag utility will not do this. Keep in mind also
that the defrag routine will need free space of ~15% to run
properly, so do not load the drive too full (keep it under
31GB).

Rick, I use a third party disk defragger (Perfectdisk) which can
defrag the XP system areas. It will work even with drives as full as
mine is.

This same tool shows my D drive's MFT Zone is not even as big as the
minimum value of 12.5% of the drive which MicroSoft would expect.
The MFT is now about 90% of the MFT Zone and XP has not yet increased
the size of the MFT Zone. So I figure I need to do put it up to 25%
(setting number 2) myself. But how?

 

[b_baka]

I keep my data on my D drive which is starting to get full (30GB used
out of 35GB). The MFT on this D drive has almost completely filled
the MFT zone.

How can I increase the MFT zone on the D drive?

Is there a registry setting or can I use fsutil to do it?

Now would be a great time to buy another drive and put it in the system
if you can. 30GB are effectively obsolete and 120--200GB are the current
bargain price at around $0.50 per gigabyte. You could copy your entire
35GB to a partition on the new drive.
Bill Baka

 

[Rick \Nutcase\ Rogers]

Hi Bill,

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.

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP

Associate Expert - WindowsXP Expert Zone

Windows help - www.rickrogers.org

 

[Bill Woods]

Now would be a great time to buy another drive and put it in the
system if you can. 30GB are effectively obsolete and 120--200GB
are the current bargain price at around $0.50 per gigabyte. You
could copy your entire 35GB to a partition on the new drive.
Bill Baka

The 35GB actually is only a partition on a much larger HDD. I am
only using the term "drive" for partition because that's what
Microsoft seems to call them!

 

[Bill Woods]

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.

The MFT Zone does not seem to the right size and it is not growing
either. :-(

 

[Al Dykes]

The MFT Zone does not seem to the right size and it is not growing
either. :-(

How did you discover this ?

 

[Bill Woods]

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

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?

 

[Eric Gisin]

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]

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/documentation/Windows/XP/all/reskit/en-us/prkc_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?