[jtuck68]

I used PCPitstop's Disk DM to defragment my 20Gb hard-drive. The program found many disk fragments from prior problems I had with crashing programs using XP. One "file" identified as C:\$MFT has 731 fragments, totalling 107 Mb! I tried chkdsk /r, but didn't find those fragments. Any suggestions, other than reinstalling XP?

 

[redoak]

"CCleaner" has a setting for removing file fragments. Look under the section "System."

http://www.ccleaner.com/

CCleaner is often recommended. However, do not use the mode "Registry" in the left hand column. Any Registry cleaner is apt to cause trouble, despite some folks finding to the contrary.

{redoak}

 

[jtuck68]

Redoak,
Thanks, but I tried CCleaner without success. It gets only those tagged by chkdsk.
'$MFT" was not removed. MFT stands for NTFS's Master File Table. but I don't know what the "$" indicates.
jtuck68

 

[redoak]

Go to the very bottom of this Google page for references to "$MFT." Maybe some help among them.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=$MFT&btnG=Google+Search

{redoak}

 

[jtuck68]

Redoak, Thanks, again. I'll give those a try.
jtuck68

 

[jtuck68]

This post is intended to close my original post. An administrator on the PC Pitstop board advised me about boot-time defragging; I tried the Disk MD in Safe Mode but was unsuccessful. After research on Microsoft KB and on several download sites, and trial of several programs, I settled on Diskeeper. The program took longer to download than it did to fix my problems. On the first pass with Diskeeper in the boot-time defrag mode, the $MFT 731 fragments were reduced to three fragments, along with other improvements.

JT - Army Strong