can somebody explain this behavior ?

Hi
i did notice a strange behavior

well i have ti9 , i make an image and i restore it with the boot cd


ok after the restore i find many many space allocated like "space reserved to mft" , this space is too much, immediately after the data

well the problem is that
before making the image i haven't so much space reserved to mft , and after the restore like wizardry i find so many space tagged like space reserved

and this space is one of the more fast zone of the c:

i did a trial , today , i had the c: that's perfect, without this space
backup & restore , and now i have so many mb i think there are 6GB of space reserved to mtf

thanks
i use ti9 last build

can i bring back this zone to the original state

 

For Windows XP, the default size of the MFT, including its reserved zone, is 12.5% of the partition. If desired you can make this number larger, but not smaller. Based on this, if your MFT plus its reserved zone is around 6 GB then this would imply that your C partition is about 48 GB. Is this correct? If not, what size is your C partition? Perhaps you have performed a tweak that makes your MFT Zone larger than its default size.

The MFT sees very high usage, and thus it needs to be located in the fastest part of the drive. Your MFT is right where it should be, near the outer part of your drive and directly adjacent to your data. It needs to be near the rim of the drive for best performance, and it should also be as close as possible to the majority of your data so the read/write heads won't have to travel as far. I'm pretty sure that if you had more data then your MFT would have been placed farther into the drive.

 

thanks for you detailed, itemized answer

but i did not understand why there were not zone reserved to mtf before the restore (al last not so much space) , i make a backup and after 1 minute i restore it , so i did not understand this!


yes my c: is 60GB

 

This is rough but this is essentially how it works. If you need to use the space for files, windows will yield unused space in the reserved zone. The reason for reserving it is so that it can be continuous -- So it marks out space and only gives it up when it has to, when the rest of the disk is full. Some disk defraggers move the location or alter ths size of the reserved-for-mft zone--it can be done, but there isn't much benefit to doing so.

 

thanks
but this zone appears only after a restore!
after some time it will disapear
i did not understand why this zone marked appears only after a restore

 

I wish I could answer that, but I'm not really sure why your MFT Reserved Zone appeared to be smaller before the restore. It might be related to the history of the drive. If your C partition was significantly smaller when you first formatted it, and then you enlarged it using a partition manager, this sort of thing might happen. Or maybe you restored a smaller partition into a larger one. Totally guessing here.

The filesystem reserves the MFT Zone for the future expansion of the MFT for as long as possible, but eventually it will allow ordinary data to use that portion of the disk if there is nowhere else for it to go. So, the only way to "get rid" of the MFT Reserved Zone (although this is not recommended) would be to fill your entire partition with data.

If you fill your partition with many small files (which require more directory entries, indexes etc.), the MFT will expand to fill the entire Reserved Zone and will eventually overflow into the data area. However, if you fill up your partition with large files (requiring fewer MFT directory entries), the data area will fill up first, and the data files will overflow into the MFT. Either way the MFT will become fragmented, hurting performance. The best practice is to not let your disk get that full, particularly if it contains your OS.

Sorry I can't explain why your Reserved Zone now appears to be larger.