Just a pet peeve of mine, but I do like to have a clean drive every now and again.

This also applies to my parents machine, when I visit them I try to give it maintenance to correct any issues from previous visits.

My dad insists on using this crap program called historykill so he can cover his porn surfin tracks from mom. On the surface, it does do that though my mom can see right through that. However, what it also does is massively increases the size of the MFT for every damn file that is created and destroyed. For example, a new google cookie is made when I visit google, and the moment I close the browser, that crap program erases the cookie, but an MFT entry has been made and reserved, in spite of said cookie no longer accessable unless I do a data recovery.

I am not interested in data recovery. At least not for these mundane things. What I am interested in is clearing that MFT without reformatting and resinstalling EVERYTHING the parents have on their computer. To give you an idea of the size of this MFT, it is just over 1/3 the space of a 100 gig partition (a 160G drive) according to O&O Defrag. My own personal drive, which I have added and deleted MANY files and programs over the past year and my MFT is less than a gig in size.

I realize it is just "reserved" space, but I am an anal retentive this kind of crap bugs me kind of guy and want to clean it up. That and I highly suspect that the slow response to disk IO on their computer is being caused by this massively large MFT, in spite of a system defrag along with the MFT supposedly being defragged via O&O. My own personal PC, defragging does improve stability and performance via drive I/O, so I know I should see a similar thing on the parents, but I do not.

I am thinking of using Acronis True Image (or Ghost) to "fix" this problem, however, I cannot find any clear as a bell information as to whether or not these programs will replace the MFT with a new "small" one after reformatting the drive. The backup I had created was NOT a sector by sector one, simply one that images the OS and boot info, along with whatever was installed.

The documentation just isn't clear about whether the MFT is also copied in its entirety if I use that image. Obviously, in this case, I do not want to go through all that waste of time if this does not correct the MFT issue I am having.



thoughts???