Macrium Reflect changes the space reserved for MFT

Okay, here's a puzzler. Sorry I don't have any attachments so I'll try to give a good description.

This problem only occurs on our Dell desktop. It's an older model, I think around 2004. It has XP SP3 and all Windows patches are current. When I restore an image with Macrium Reflect, it changes the space reserved for the MFT. When I create an image, the MFT only occupies four squares in Defraggler, but after restoring it'll take up a line and a half. The weird thing it only does it on this one machine. We've got two other computers, a Toshiba laptop with Vista and an eMachines with XP, and they both restore perfectly. I can get it back to four squares easy enough by running a boot-time defrag with PerfectDisk, but PerfectDisk isn't something I normally keep installed and it's pretty annoying having to install it just to uninstall it again. It'd be great if I could figure this out. Anyone got any ideas?

P.S. I would've posted in the Macrium forum but it's only open to those who have purchased it and I use the free version.

 

Not exactly sure why Macrium would change this, but I can tell you that I have almost an identical Dell XP setup and Defraggler shows quite a bit of reserved MFT space.

What can affect this reserved MFT size is the amount of space you have allocated for system restore points. I believe the default size is 12%, but I have reduced mine to 5%. Because I also have two usb external HDDs attached (1TB and 2TB), I have lots of squares that are reserved, but I have reduced the restore point size for these down to 1% each.

By the way, the amount of reserved MFT space does not actually reduce your available unused working disk space.

 

I did a restore so I could take a closer look at what it's doing. It moves the space reserved for the MFT from where PerfectDisk puts it (outlined in red), and puts it at the end. It has to be something that's beyond the control of Macrium, on the motherboard maybe, I don't know. Looks like I might just have to live with it.