I was recently most intrigued to see that Mark Russinovich
has updated his "contig.exe" command line defragging tool
to be able to defrag a number of metadata files, including
the MFT.
=> See here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/default.aspx
Oddly enough, whilst this is mentioned [at the moment] on the
Sysinternals home page, it isn't on contig's own webpage.
Anyway, I downloaded it and tried it out, it did indeed defrag
the MFT of one of my drives. I must admit, I always thought that
this was infeasible [except possibly at boot time].
Anyway, I also recently tried out another well-known freeware
defragger on a drive and noticed that it fragmented the MFT
(as shown using Defraggler).
So, then I tried to fix that using contig, and it worked.
And then I refragmented it again using the other defragger,
and upon a whim tried Defraggler on that drive to see if it could
also defrag the MFT...and it did !
I've looked in the Defraggler history and can't find any reference
to it becoming capable of defragging the MFT, so I am somewhat surprised
at this ! Is this "for real", I wonder, or is Defraggler misreporting
the status of the MFT ?
Incidentally, I've tried Auslogics' DiskDefrag on the same drive when
the MFT is fragmented, and it's not managed to fix it.
So, over to the forum for comments....
- THM
------8<------------------- EDIT ------------------------->8----------
Well, I just googled about a bit and found this....
http://www.piriform.com/docs/defraggler/using-defraggler/understanding-the-drive-map
Which explains that Defraggler can indeed defrag the MFT.
Does anyone know when this capability was introduced ?