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Same 4 files always show as fragmented


jpChris

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Hi all,

 

I know this has probably been answered before, but I don't know what search term(s) to use.

 

Anyway, I've been using DeFraggler since about two weeks after dirt was invented and I've noticed some discrepancies between hard drives after defrag.

 

The one that has me puzzled is a "new" clean install of XP w\SP2. When I ran DeFraggler there was one red block at the beginning of the GUI window:

4 Files

$Boot 1 fragment 8kb

$MFT 2 fragments 20,368kb

MSTWEB.CAT 1 fragment 8kb

$BadClus:$Bad 1 fragment 8,401,963kb

 

Since it's a new drive, I ran CHKDSK anyway. There were no problems or bad anything or recovered anything; according to Event Viewer\Application\Winlogon.

 

Do I have a problem? Why is it showing a Bad Cluster of 8GB? Or am I reading it wrong? Also, what's wrong with the Master File Table? I have other drives I use DeFraggler on and there's no red blocks anywhere.

 

TIA.

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From Wikipedia :

"$BadClus : A file which contains all the clusters marked as having bad sectors. This file simplifies cluster management by the chkdsk utility, both as a place to put newly discovered bad sectors, and for identifying unreferenced clusters. This file contains two data streams, even on volumes with no bad sectors: an unnamed stream contains bad sectors?it is zero length for perfect volumes; the second stream is named $Bad and contains all clusters on the volume not in the first stream."

 

..This means you've got LOTS of bad clusters.

 

 

Is your disk nearly full of data ? This would explain the MFT fragmentation.

PS : Install SP3 :-)

Piriform French translator

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Hi Aethec,

 

..This means you've got LOTS of bad clusters.

 

It's a brand-new drive. Plus, it works flawlessly ? I have no problems opening, nor running, all my apps. When I formatted the drive, I used the 512 byte cluster size instead of the default 4kb size. Do you think that might be the problem with this drive? I have several other drives with the 512 cluster size and no problems.

 

Is your disk nearly full of data ? This would explain the MFT fragmentation.

 

No. My C partition is 8GB and only 2.5GB are used. Also, my pagefile is on my D partition.

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I don't know exact since which version, but as of version 1.15.163, I believe it has a bug on how it handles non-compressed sparse file types. Defraggler still "thinks" that a range of sparse clusters actually consume physical clusters. The "$BadClus:$Bad" file is a non-compressed sparse file and this is the cause of the problem where users are seeing that file even though their NTFS volume don't have any bad cluster at all (even if it's a 6 years old drive like mine - still healthy). Other files which are the same file type may likely to suffer this bug. I suggest the Dev Team take a look at that particular part of the code.

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Hi Jaelani,

I suggest the Dev Team take a look at that particular part of the code.

I'll second that! I know in the previous versions of DF the same block at the beginning of the UI it was blue.

 

Hmmm, maybe I'll uninstall this version and use the previous one and see if makes any difference. I'll post back if it does.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Hi Dennis,

 

I did as I said and uninstalled v1.15 and reinstalled v1.12: There were no red blocks.

 

I used the computer for a couple of weeks and Defraggled again: And again, no red blocks.

 

I uninstalled 1.12 and reinstalled 1.15 (I didn't defrag after reinstall) and used the computer for a couple of weeks and reran 1.15. Well, the red blocks showed up again!

 

According to the info in your link, "$BadClus marks the sector as bad. . . it does not mean that the sector is bad, only that the NTFS file system thinks it is."

 

Is there any way to get Defraggler to behave and ignore the $BadClus, or get Windows to "unthink" it's bad?

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Hi Chris.

 

I don't pretend to understand this stuff. It's more for the developers to properly explain it, which is what Romanov tried to do recently in another topic.

 

http://forum.piriform.com/index.php?showto...mp;#entry136074

 

It appears to be perfectly normal to have 1 $BadClus:$Bad file roughly representing the size of your partition.

 

This is the result of doing a search on my PC for $BadClus:$Bad:

 

bX3FEs.png

 

Do you get the red block/s if you target $BadClus:$Bad with the search feature, or are the red entries from one of the other files you mentioned?

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