CC, and as far as i know other applications, will 'wipe' the MFT by creating sufficient small files to fill all MFT records and then deleting them - as explained in post 14 well over a year ago. Thus all these records will not contain zeroes but the info relating to the now deleted file. You will gain nothing in compressible data, it may be worse than before. In any event the MFT is comparatively small so you wouldn't gain a great deal.
I would think that a zeroed MFT record, however you created it, would cause the validity checking to fail and would result in a corrupt MFT.
Right now, I'm stuck with a disk image that is almost 10GB in size COMPRESSED when there are less than 5GB of data used on the disk.
I think you have allowed yourself to be stuck with an unsuitable imaging application or mode of disc image creation.
I know that Macrium and Acronis give the choices (under different names) of Intelligent or Forensic images.
An "Intelligent" copy disregards all the Free Space sectors
A "Forensic" copy disregards nothing.
Since a 5.98 GB Macrium image holds all 4 primary partitions with data space totalling 16.7 + 3.2 + 0.3 + 0.1 = 20.3 GB on my Win 7 machine,
your 5 GB of data would have to be incredibly dense and incompressible to use even halve the information held in your 10 GB image.
I would guess that it is more likely that your 5 GB would compress down below 3 GB and the remaining 7 GB of the image probably holds the information of 14 to 25 GB of free space and/or one ginormous MFT
+ 1 from me!
I had to upgrade memory on someone's computer & they are constantly adding/deleting/uninstalling/moving files on their machine.
They were running XP just 512 MB RAM (using 530 to 600 something though!), so their computer ran very slow due to the virtual ram (harddisk page file) being used.
I upgraded them to 1.25 GB ram, & it solved that problem, but their computer still ran like a turtle.
After running the Wipe MFT function in CCleaner, it sped up like 10 times faster! No lie!
Anyway, I would love to see CCleaner include just a MFT cleaner, because I had having to click cancel out.
Just wastes disk thrashing when all you need is a MFT clean!
Before we rush into another myth, I'd like to see any reasoning why 'Wipe MFT' would give any performance change. It replaces one deleted file name with another deleted file name. There are the same number of deleted MFT records, in the same position as before.
Before we rush into another myth, I'd like to see any reasoning why 'Wipe MFT' would give any performance change. It replaces one deleted file name with another deleted file name. There are the same number of deleted MFT records, in the same position as before.
Augeas, I am not 100% sure...
But I know it works.
I wouldn't post here if it didn't.
Light users may never run into the need to test this.
But if your a heavy user like me, you definitely will from time to time.
I assume that it is replacing the deleted file name with empty data, which causes windows to stop tracking the changes to that entry.
I assume that it is replacing the deleted file name with empty data, which causes windows to stop tracking the changes to that entry.
The recognisable file name is replaced with a rubbish file name. The file length is changed. Deleted MFT records are not tracked, but remain flagged as reusable.
The recognisable file name is replaced with a rubbish file name.
Does a name change defeat the service "Distributed Link Tracking Client" ?
Would that continue to follow the new "rubbish" file name ?
Yesterday with Firefox closed I renamed urlclassifier3.sqlite as urlclassifier3_.sqlite in the C:\Users\User\... profile,
and created in its place a Hard Link to urlclassifier3.sqlite in my profile C:\Users\Alan\...
I switched to the User profile and launched Firefox and found that the old file with the new name was still in use.
I had to delete the old file before Firefox would use the Hard Link into the file in my profile.
I had to disable "Distributed Link Tracking Client" on XP because of the grief it caused to Acronis True Image,
and the only reason it is still active in Windows 7 is that the internal workings are concealed and mysterious,
and I do not know the dark forces I might encounter ! !
'Recognisable' and 'rubbish' are human conceits, to NTFS there is only a file name. As the MFT record is flagged as deleted, and the MFT bitmap updated to show that the record is available for reuse, both before and after the file name change, I can't see that it has any involvement in any active file management.
I have the Dist Link Tracking service active, as I don't know what will happen if I turn it off.