MFT disappears from drive view - possible bug

Defraggler Defraggler Bug Reporting
1

Hi, I was using Defraggler (v2.09.391) yesterday and suddenly there was no MFT displayed on analysis except for the last two squares which were purple.

This was very worrying. The last two squares appeared in purple and contained $mft and $security*** respectively. I tried a "run once" boot time defrag but with no difference. Reboots did not bring back the MFT. Defrag appeared to work normally but no proper MFT. I tried using Chkdsk (somewhere I read that this might restore the MFT) but no improvement.

By now I'm really worried that a system rebuild might be needed but the system appeared to be working normally.

Today however (system off overnight) I tried the standard Windows defrag and the MFT is back where it was, roughly in the middle of the drive space. Defraggler also now shows it again in the correct place.

Is this a known bug? I've been using Defraggler in preference to Windows defrag for about 2 years and never seen anything like this before.

The drive (Windows XP system) is a logical drive using two identical 120Gb hard drives in RAID 1 (mirror).The XP system is fully updated. There are no errors on the drives. Hardware is Gigabyte UD3LR with ICH10R controller. 4Gb of memory of which system uses circa 3.25Gb

I would appreciate any comments.

Eddie

2

Hi. It's done it again. Got a screenshot this time.

The purple should be about 1 and a bit lines long (10+% of the drive).

Other drives correctly show MFT.

System continues to function correctly.

Re-install and reboot didn't work either.

Anyone else????

Eddie

post-61198-0-50999300-1331993526_thumb.png

3

It looks ok to me. Mine varies in size, currently it's just one block. nvw2so.png

4

Yours doesn't look right either. My guess is it should be showing as a row and a half across the centre or less likely at the bottom.

The MFT is normally created near the centre of the drive and uses about 10-12% of the drive in a contiguous chunk.

It's always a fixed length, created when the drive is partitioned.

What does your D drive look like?

Eddie

5

What does your D drive look like?

24eb9q8.png These images are from my Win7 pc.

I checked my Vista pc which has similar sized partitions -- OS had one purple block, D drive's map also shows an MFT string of many blocks.

So you're ok. :)

6

2.09 shows 1 purple block on my 32 Bit Windows 7 Drive C:

My other 2 partitions show multiple blocks.

The OS partition shows 430 files in a single block. The other 2 partitions show from 1, to 0 or even 3 files in a block. I am assuming that the Piriform people just made it easier to avoid confusion by consolidating all the MFT files under a single purple block. Not, of course, that it really only takes one block, since some of the files are several MB & I know they have to be taking up neighboring blocks due the partition table drive map.

I could be wrong on my opinion, or course, but this is my speculation.

7

Eddie, it's the MFT Zone that's allocated 12.5% of the partition space in XP. The MFT can be any size (mine is 30 mb) and sits in the MFT Zone. The zone is usually free of other files unless the partition has been short of space at some time.

From Vista onwards the MFT Zone is 200 mb, with the MFT sitting inside. When you reach around 200,000 files the MFT fills the zone so an additional 200 mb zone is allocated anywhere on the drive, and life continues.

I don't know if this is the reason why you are seeing a far smaller MFT than you are expecting, as I'm not a Defraggler user.

8

At any rate, it puzzles me how it is like this on my partitions:

C: 1 purple MFT block. 430 files. (65 GB / 33 GB used, 32 GB free)

D: 14 purple MFT blocks. Block 1 has 1 file, block 14 has 3. Blocks 2 through 13 have zero files. (11 GB / 7 GB used, 4 GB free)

E: 41 purple MFT blocks. Block 1 has 1 file, block 41 has 2 files. Blocks 2 through 40 have zero files. (4 GB / 3 GB used, 1 GB free)

On similar note, the paging files:

C: 46 Brown blocks. Block 1 has 12 files. All the others have 1.

D: None

E: None

9

Further to my earlier posts, I didn't get any change to the display of the MFT zone on my C: drive whilst I continued to use version 2.09. On updating to version 2.10, the MFT zone appeared correctly, ie. circa 10% of the drive space. I thought good, they fixed the bug. However, on updating to v2.11, back came the bug. Just a few blocks of the MFT showing (although all the blocks which should have been displayed were empty and never got used during defrag).

I have since upgraded to the Pro version, also v2.11, and the display is still in error.

So if they fixed it in v2.10, it happened by accident and now it's back again!!!!

Eddie.