Is MFT boot-time defragmentation long?

I had just started a boot-time defragmentation. I wan to defrag the
master file table (MFT) and the paging file. The had kept the task running and went outside. Now when I am back after 12 hours I fond that the task is still working. It is not yet finished. I am having Windows XP professional sp2 here. And I had installed it on C drive. The drive has around 20GB space. The defragmentation tool which I am using is from Diskeeper. I think this is not right here. My system is having some kind of issue. I think MFT defrag simply does not take such a long time.

I had used this really long before. I warn you that any changes of MFT should be done with extreme care. Because if that is damaged then you can simply loose your hard drive. MFT corruption can simply very risky and also it is very complicated to recover data from the same. You must try some other application. The problem can be due to the software. There are ample of tools available on the web which can help you to defrag mft.

If this works then the your drive performance will be more better. It will be more increased and also perform better. Another thing you can do here is defrag your system registry. It will boost the system performance to great extent. But you must ensure that you are doing this with all care. It can damage the system. MFT defrag basically depends on the tools you are using. If there are poor tools then it will simply not work well.

What you did later on. I will still recommend you to leave your system as it is. Because if the defrag process is blocked then you might land into more trouble. It is essential that you must use a proper tool. From where you got that tool. The more you can do here is simply visit the official forum of that tool and post the problem. The same will give you more information on dealing with the problem.

I will recommend you to find out some manual on the same. That manual will guide you in fixing the problem in more detail way. I will also recommend you to run chkdsk or defragmenting. Later on you can also run Disk CleanUp which is another good way of fixing the problem. If some kind of serious issue occurred then you run System Restore option which is one of the good way of fixing errors you are facing.