AJW Posted December 19, 2010 Share Posted December 19, 2010 I have defraggled my backup drive; there is a large portion taken up with purple reserved mft space. On hovering over the segments they are listed as empty. Could someone explain why and tell me how to remove this from my drive. Thanks Alan Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rob Defraggle Posted December 19, 2010 Share Posted December 19, 2010 It's the Master File Table, and part of the NTFS filesystem internals (likely reserved a large block to avoid fragmenting it). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Piers66 Posted December 21, 2010 Share Posted December 21, 2010 Hello, I'm in the same position. I've just added a second hard drive to my PC to use as a data backup. It came out of another machine, and is partitioned into two halves, and now registers as E: and F:. E: used to be the winXP boot drive, and F: used to be for data. I've removed all the old windows files, but want to keep some of the data (almost all audio) that's still in F:. E: is pretty much empty. F: has purple blocks which take up about 1/8 of the drive. Is this a leftover from when the drive was previosuly used? Can I get rid of it? Thanks. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Moderators Augeas Posted December 21, 2010 Moderators Share Posted December 21, 2010 Yes, if you upgrade to Vista/7. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Piers66 Posted December 21, 2010 Share Posted December 21, 2010 Yes, if you upgrade to Vista/7. Hello again, Err... That was two questions! Do you mean Yes, it's a leftover, or Yes I can get rid of it? I don't want to upgrade to Vista or 7 (as I've got a lot of older software). I presume I could copy the files on this partition somewhere else, and then wipe / reformat / whatever the partition to get rid of the pre-allocated space. This seems like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Is there no neater solution? Thanks. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
eL_PuSHeR Posted December 21, 2010 Share Posted December 21, 2010 If you reformat and continue to use XP the reserved area will still be there. Vista/7 use a different approach to alleviate future MFT fragmentation and do not allocate that "reserved space" as XP does. In fact, I have installed Seven a few days ago (I was using XP) and now that gap can be filled with data when defragmenting. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Moderators Augeas Posted December 21, 2010 Moderators Share Posted December 21, 2010 It seems what's worrying you is the sight of those purple blocks. They will not affect your use of the pc at all. When the drive is 7/8 full files will be written in the MFT reserved space. Personally I'd just ignore them, it's an aspect of XP as ElP says. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mr don Posted December 25, 2010 Share Posted December 25, 2010 It has been a while since I have used FAT 32. If it bothers you too badly, you could use FAT32, I assume. I am not 100% for certain on this, & NTFS offers greater file sizes/stability as opposed to FAT32 from my understanding... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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