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	18 October 1999 Hello From the Tech Chair MFT Tip If your company has workstations and notebooks that have only one NTFS partition, you may find it interesting to review the experience I have just had with a horribly fragmented Master File Table or MFT. NOTE: Rarely do I rave about third party software and you must believe that this is not a shameless plug. The machine was an IBM notebook that had been sent to me to troubleshoot performance issues. The partition was 2.01GB and was only 60% full (many useless files had been deleted or archived). However, the fragmentation would not reduce and installing or copying anything would increase the fragmentation significantly. Using Diskeeper's Analysis I discovered the MFT had 1466 excess fragments, 364 directory fragments and the paging file was in 77! After running CHKDSK /F, I installed Diskeeper 5.0 Workstation and scheduled the new features. I chose to consolidate the directories, defragment the MFT and Page File in boot mode. I rebooted and the process began right after the boot menu. It was late Monday night and I watched the process for an hour then went to bed. I suspect it took several hours since there was a tremendous amount of work to do. Tuesday morning I logged on and ran an Analysis. The results were phenomenal! There were no excess directory fragments, the page file was in one contiguous piece and the number of MFT fragments was two! Problem solved and I am very impressed. Executive Software has attained the 'Holy Grail' of NTFS defragmentation as far as I am concerned. From what I've learned here in the Tech Chair, I won't have to run the boot time utilities for a very long time since Diskeeper will keep the situation from happening again. Tidbit : The new October TechNet CD reports that SP6 is released and to uninstall the BETA. If anyone has applied SP6, send me your reports ASAP so I can compile the data for the readers. --------- W2000 Tips Right click on My Computer, choose Properties/Advanced to get access to Performance Options, 'Environment Variables' and 'Startup and Recovery Options'. Win98/95 Tips Here is a note for Windows 95/98 users. Diskeeper 5 Workstation will defragment faster and better than the built-in defragmenter. Roger Capps Windows NT Technical Support In Charge If you have any comments about this article or any requests for new technical articles e-mail
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