After running a wipe free space I observed my MFT zone had shrunk to a tiny size (one block displayed in Defraggler). I assume this happened, because CCleaner fills up the free space with one huge file and Windows releases the MFT zone in order to accomodate this file. However, this implies that the MFT will get fragmented as soon as you copy additional files to the disk.

Is there no way to write data (eg. zeros) to unallocated clusters without creating a file as such?

regards,
Mike

As I'm sure you know the 'standard' way of wiping free space is to fill up the disk with large files, and this includes the MFT zone. However the files are then deleted, leaving the disk with the same amount of free space as before, and the MFT zone as empty, or as full, as it was before.

I don't really know how CC's wipe free space works, and I know even less about Defraggler. In XP it is not possible to reduce the MFT zone below 12.5% (according to M/S) so I wouldn't think that your zone has decreased in size. Do any other Defraggler users notice this? In Vista the MFT is treated differently (from what I remember), being allocated in not-necessarily-contiguous 200k blocks.

This is assuming that the wipe free space option ran to completion and removed all filler files.

I don't think that it is wise to write to clusters without going through Windows file allocation processes, otherwise you could be in deep youknowwhat.

True, after deletion of the dummy files the (previous) MFT zone is freed too. But apparently it is not reserved for MFT anymore (at least, that's what Defraggler claims). So regular files might be placed where originally the MFT zone was.

It writes a huge file until the disk is full.

I mentioned Defraggler just, because it displays the MFT zone on its drive map.

Afaik, windows WILL decrease the MFT zone as the disk is getting almost full, downto whatever size it takes to fit the new files on the disk.

Probably true ....

To be pedantic, when the non-mft zone area of the disk is full then Windows will place new files in the mft zone, which is not the same as reducing the mft zone size. When these files are deleted then the mft zone resumes it's size and function (that's an assumption). I would rather lean towards Defraggler not truly reporting the mft zone than the zone being reduced.

Are you on XP? Do you have the default MFT zone size (12.5%) or is (was) your zone larger by a multiple of that?

Oh yes, can you do something like allocating a file large enough to be seen, and then look in Defraggler to see whether it's been put in the mft zone or not?

Yes, I'm on XP Pro SP3. I had set the MFT zone size to 2 (which means 25% I think) for test purposes.

The situation was the following: I had the $MFT file in the middle of other data. The MFT zone was sitting somewhere at the end of my disk (probably because I changed the MFT zon size in the registry once). Then I started wipe free space and watched it happen in Defraggler on the drive map. As the disk was filled up with the temporary file, the MFT zone was halved repeatedly to make space until it was gone completely (this is done by Windows). Finally, when the wipe-file was deleted by CCleaner again, the complete MFT zone was relocated (by Windows, I guess) to sit right behind my original $MFT file, ie. now covering all my normal data files that are placed behind the $MFT file. So, apparently Windows is doing strange things with the MFT zone when free disk space is running short. But most likely CCleaner is not to blame for that.
I don't know, what went wrong in my first try (when the MFT zone was gone completely after wiping).

Well, that's put a different complexion on things. I don't know if this is to do with your zone changes, or is something that Windows has done, or some combination of both. It's all rather peculiar though.

Thank you, you may have solved my problem. Not a big problem but it has been annoying me.

The MFT Zone is a large area which is supposed to be continuous with MFT so that MFT can expand into it without fragmenting. However on my drive the Zone is near the end of the partition, nowhere near either the MFT or the MFT-2 copy, as you can see.
Mft starts at 7278a (=468,874), so-called Zone starts at 9aac60(=10,136,672).


I've done the usual Registry machinations but nothing changes that misplaced zone. And anyway, I wouldn't want a gigantic dead zone in the fastest part of the drive.

Defragmenters all move the MFT and other system files to the fastest part of the drive, and leave a small pad after the MFT. That pad is the actual MFT 'zone' that NTFS uses. So I have really wanted to get rid of the useless Zone at the end of the partition - although it doesn't really decrease the available disk space, according to Microsoft.

You seem to have hit on a way I can accomplish this. .
I am going to try wiping free space. I'm hoping it will cause NTFS to reconstitute a smaller Zone in the right place. Thanks, I never would have thought of it and I believe it should work. (Can't do it right now, PC is too busy).

In the picture, the $ files, including $mft, are in the first 5 (red) squares. The MFT Zone is all that purple at the end.