[New MFT Cleaning Very Slow & Hangs Vista]

Don't. Wipe. Free. Space.

Unless you are selling your PC.

Wipe Free Space only deletes already deleted files. It doesn't improve performance, and it doesn't free up space.

 

Oh, I know it doesn't free up space nor improve performance, and that in general, people shouldn't use it. I wipe free space in order that my disk images (generated by dd if=/dev/sdaX or so on linux) will compress better because most of what they compress will be zero.

 

As a follow up, it eventually did complete after some 6-8 hours (250GB disk, 5400rpm). It was only the MFT cleaning that was slow, the rest of the process was fast.

[New MFT Cleaning Very Slow & Hangs Vista]

I also have this problem. My machine is a Toshiba Portege A605-P200. I just last night upgraded from Vista and applied all pending win7 updates, so perhaps the problem is related to online upgrades? For the last 4 hours, it has been working on Wiping the MFT Free Space, and for the last hour or so has been showing 2 hours, 8 minutes remaining. Completion percent has grown slowly, even if the estimated ETA has not changed - I just noticed in the past 5 minutes that it bumped up from 36% complete to 41% complete. I'll check to see if I can reproduce with a clean install, which I'm not sure if I can do, but here's hoping...