Defrag the $MFT should not be allowed

I was able to defrag the MFT on my C drive.

See the photo below:

post-38474-12778450094_thumb.jpg

Needless to say, the next time I booted the PC did not.

Thank God for backups.

Are you sure? Even if hightlited, Defraggler refuses to do anything for the $MFT, at least for me, running Windows XP. If I force it to defrag, it will say, "0 files defragged".

I have Windows 7 home edition 64Bit. Defraggler did defrag the Master File Table on my machine.

I believe that from Vista on the MFT is allocated in 200k blocks as required, and there is no pre-specified MFT Zone as there is XP. You can defrag these blocks by making them contiguous but to no great advantage.

There is an MFT Zone in Vista+, I can see it on my computer (Win7).

Actually, since the MFT is used to find all other files, I think it's the most important file to be defragged ;)

Ah, maybe I missed out a few words here and there. Microsoft can say it far better then I can...

'Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 use a default size of 200MB for the initial MFT zone reservation. As the MFT outgrows the default zone due to more files being added to the volume, the MFT will create another 200MB zone to grow into. This change to fixed amount versus a percentage was done to deal with increasing size of volumes and create better efficiencies.'

And also...

'For workstation or server profiles that have large MFT?s, it is possible that the MFT will be more ?fragmented? however these fragments will be 200MB in size a piece so the performance impact will be negligible.'

All in http://support.microsoft.com/kb/961095.