Win XP Pro Master File Table

[Harry]

Help, help, help !

I've been having a problem with decreasingly slow
startups on my wife's PC. I just error-checked drive C
and then defragged it -- the report stated that the
Master File Table was at 99% capacity. Do you think this
might be a problem with super slow start ups -- if so,
how do I bang up the space allocated for this ?

Thanks for your time.

Harry

 

[Jerry]

How big is the hard drive and how much space is in use or available? Sounds
like the drive is almost full.

 

[Harry]

Jerry

Its a Maxtor 60GB drive with 17GB used and 40GB free;
88.5k files

The MFT frag stats are as follows:

Total MFT size = 91MB
MFT record count = 92,394
Percent MFT in use = 99%
Total MFT fragments = 234

The PC is a bit long-in-the-tooth -- 1.3GHz; P-4; 1GB RAM
(Rambus highspeed); HP Pavillion/Intel/etc. The only
other comment I would offer is that she uses this PC
mainly for photo stuff and tends to take most of her pix
in high resolution, so she's constantly whipping around
lots of large files -- the defrag took over an hour to
complete.

Harry

 

[Jetro]

Reboot into Safe mode and compare the start time. Does the Defrag Analyzer
recommend to defrag?

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q174619
How NTFS Reserves Space for its Master File Table (MFT)

 

[Bill]

Your MFT is very fragmented (234 fragments). On both of
my machines, the MFT is in 2 fragments. I run Diskkeeper
8.0, which allows you to perform a "boot time" defrag,
and defrags the MFT as well.

Bill