Basically I had a drive which was defragged with some utility in the past. The fragmented pagefile was towards the end of the drive (not the fault of a defrag utility per se, rather a system managed one, and XP decided to increase the size and place it at the end of the drive), and so was the MFT. Looked like the MFT reserved zone got trashed at some point, so it too was also toward the end of the drive and was very small. I realise this reserved figure can dynamically change, but on 'standard' installs that haven't been touched with third party defragmenters, I've always seen the reserved MFT at the beginning of the disk with a 12%~ allocation so the MFT can grow contiguously.
You know when you freshly format an NTFS volume and you get a blank bit at the start (fastest part of the disk) then pagefile, then MFT, and the MFT reserved zone, then finally the remaining free space? The idea being, windows has the pagefile/mft/reserved mft zone at the beginning of the disk (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc767961.aspx). My goal was to restore this disk to this conventional setup, without having to offload data from the partition (as there's *a lot*).
It's all finished now, but in the course of using this handy feature of Defraggler, I figured i might find out if 0MB is the equivalent of being disabled.
(FWIW, the combination of Defraggler to move large files first and then MyDefrag with its script to remove the remaining 'catch all' ~1MB files was much faster than letting the latter do the entire lot)
Cheers