I have disk drive E:. It is formatted as NTFS on Windows 2000.

It is essentially used for storing three things:

- All games are installed to this drive.
- All MP3s are kept on this drive.
- I keep downloads on that drive.

It's a faster disk drive than my other disks, so I put my paging file there, too.

I decided to defragment the drive. I know it won't defragment the paging file, so I temporarily tell Windows to use C for its paging file. Reboot. Defragment, with the intent of putting the paging file back onto E when the defragment was done. That way the paging file will be contiguous after I'm all done.

Now, since I didn't install the OS to that drive, and I'm not running anything that has files locked open on that drive, I would expect that it could defragment the drive 100 percent. Which it does fine. But here's the funny thing.

There's three green stripes on graph. Two near the beginning and one big fat stripe near the middle. The legend says green stripes are "system files". But I took the paging file off of that drive. And there aren't any files on the drive tagged with the "System" flag as far as I know (dir /S /AS and dir /S /ASH reveals nothing).

So what the heck are those system files? NTFS doesn't store its file allocation table at the center of the disk does it? And if the one in the middle is the allocation table, what are the two small green stripes near the beginning of the disk?

You using a RAID on that box?

Did you manually delete pagefile.sys after moving it to C: ? I wonder if the defragger checks file names.

They could possibly be file allocation tables. Decent filesystems keep more than two hanging around. (That was one of FAT32s vulnerabilities.)

NTFS doesn't store its file allocation table at the center of the disk does it?

Perhaps not at the center, but NTFS definitely keeps at least one backup copy of the file allocation table elsewhere in the partition. I learned this recently when I accidentally deleted a partition containing over 20GB of someone else's files. I was able to recover it, though.

On another note, I have a separate partition on my single hard drive, which stores nothing but personal and media files. Win2K's Disk Defragmenter also shows green stripes for me on that partition. No system file of any kind has ever been put there by me, nor were any by Windows AFAIK.

The way Windows 2000 works, I don't need to manually delete the file as far as I know. I couldn't see a file named Pagefile.sys on that drive after making the change.

It must be something related to the file allocation somehow, I can't think of anything else it could be.

By the way, when I said "center" of the disk, I meant that the stripe is in the middle of the graph. If it were physically at the center of the disk close to the spindle, then it would have been at the left end of the graph. I'm sure you all knew what I meant though.

more than likely, its the mft. not sure if there is any freeware utilities that will do this task. but, you can install a trial version of Executive Diskeeper and do a bootup defrag to get the MFT and directory structures fixed up, then uninstall.

Is there anything wrong with having the MFT in the "middle" of the disk? Is it there for a specific reason, perhaps because that's the best average position so the head doesn't have to travel as far to reach it?

one of the alternative disk defragmenters (perfectdisk i think) puts the paging file and mft right in the middle for that very same reason. i thought it was pretty nifty.