"Wipe MFT Free Space drive C" not completing

[xantya]

Initially, this product ran very rapidly, and got to 98% completion in a couple of minutes. It said it would take 9 minutes to complete thereafter...which became 12 minutes...then 37 minutes...then 3 hours...etc. At this point, it's been "cleaning" for the last 30 hours, and it estimates another 16 hours will be needed. What's happening? Do I cancel the clean?

[TPDunn52]

My issues is similar. I did the WIPE diSK - free space only AND IT SAID 100% but the only button was a CANCEL button and that was 4 hours after it was finished. So I clicked the cancel button. Now I have a LARGE file the I cannot delete. How do I get this file to delete?

[kroozer]

How do I get this file to delete?

 

You need to delete this folder or file . .

If routine deletion is blocked, delete with FileAssassin or Unlocker.

[englishman]

Initially, this product ran very rapidly, and got to 98% completion in a couple of minutes. It said it would take 9 minutes to complete thereafter...which became 12 minutes...then 37 minutes...then 3 hours...etc. At this point, it's been "cleaning" for the last 30 hours, and it estimates another 16 hours will be needed. What's happening? Do I cancel the clean?

 

I have recently acquired this problem after years of satisfactory operation.    Any ideas ?

[Nergal]

 

Initially, this product ran very rapidly, and got to 98% completion in a couple of minutes. It said it would take 9 minutes to complete thereafter...which became 12 minutes...then 37 minutes...then 3 hours...etc. At this point, it's been "cleaning" for the last 30 hours, and it estimates another 16 hours will be needed. What's happening? Do I cancel the clean?

 

 

 

I have recently acquired this problem after years of satisfactory operation.    Any ideas ?

if you cancel it, you will manually need to delete the creatrd file.

You say that "after years of operation"

Do you mean you have run driver wiper on this drive multiple times? If so you may be doing (and may have already done) major damage to the drive. One should only wipe a drive if planning on selling/retiring the drive. A hard drive can only be magnetized so many times and read/write-heads, spindles and other mechanical parts wear out.

 

My suggestion is to cancel the wipe, remove the wipe file (an obvious file or folder and the root of the drive) and run a scandsk /f

[englishman]

Hello! 

 

On my 3.20 GHZ, 6.0GB RAM desktop PC, wiping MFT free space seems to be taking forever. When I run CCleaner without the MFT , free disk space gets overwritten fairly quickly. When I Ccleaner run it on my laptop, the MFT wiping only takes a couple minutes, notably less than the hour or so to wipe the free space. Meanwhile, on my desktop PC, I've been wiping MFT space for 27 hours and it's only at 10%. 

 

Why would wiping MFT on my computer take longer than wiping the free disk space without it? Doesn't the MFT just consist of some names and info, not actual content? So confusing. 

 

Any ideas on how to expedite this MFT wipe?

 

Thanks!

 

 

I have recently acquired this problem after years of satisfactory operation.    Any ideas ?

 

Looks like the same issue.

[englishman]

if you cancel it, you will manually need to delete the creatrd file. You say that "after years of operation" Do you mean you have run driver wiper on this drive multiple times? If so you may be doing (and may have already done) major damage to the drive. One should only wipe a drive if planning on selling/retiring the drive. A hard drive can only be magnetized so many times and read/write-heads, spindles and other mechanical parts wear out. My suggestion is to cancel the wipe, remove the wipe file (an obvious file or folder and the root of the drive) and run a scandsk /f

 

Nergal

 

When I said "after years of operation" I only meant after years of using CCleaner on different PCs and laptops and occasionally using Wipe Free Space, and hence I have a very good feeing for how long each procedure usually takes CCleaner.  As for the multiple created .zzzz folders and files, these are self-deleting after I cancel the run. 

[Nergal]

Another cause could be the antimalware solution on the drive, or (if vista/win7/win8) VSS/file-history building whilst you wipe

[englishman]

Another cause could be the antimalware solution on the drive, or (if vista/win7/win8) VSS/file-history building whilst you wipe

 I'm on Windows 7 x64 and use Malwarebytes.  I'm not familiar with VSS/file history building - how can I tell if I have this active ?  Any other ideas.  I let Wipe Free Space run to completion overnight and despite showing 15 hours to complete it actually took 4 hours including Wiping the disk free space, but this only takes 5 or ten minutes, so the vast bulk of the 4 hours is for the MFT.  It used to take less than the disk free space ! 

[Augeas]

Wipe MFT is an 'add-on' to WFS, so WMFT is not run as a stand-alone exercise, but as a preliminary to WFS. Have you, can you, determine the times for these two separate events?

 

WMFT can be a complex operation. It creates individual small files to fill every unused record in the MFT, and then deletes them. In my MFT there are about 75,000 unused records, so 75k files would need to be created.

 

Each file creation requires:

 

From the start of the MFT, locate the next unused record

Locate the MFT bitmap, update the bitmap entry for the new file record from 0 to 1

Locate the MFT record for the owning folder of the new file

Insert the new file details into the file list in the MFT folder record

Rewrite the MFT folder record

Format and write the new MFT file record

(Plus transaction logs, vol sync points, etc)

Repeat 75k times

 

That's quite simple, but 75k records would have a significant and serious effect on  the owning folder's MFT record.

 

As the number of new files increases there is not enough room to hold all the data for the new files in the folder's MFT record. So folder extension records are created in the MFT. Each new file created causes NTFS to chain through these folder extension records to find the correct position in ascending sequence to insert the new file details, shuffling the following file names downwards.

 

Eventually the list of folder extension records is itself too large to fit into the original folder record, so an index record is created, separate from the MFT, which holds a list of all the folder's extension records. And another, and another... Chaining through this sequence of indexes and records is horrendous.

 

Finally, at the end of all this the whole shebang is deleted, a reversal of the above. Index records, MFT records, folder entries, bit map entries, all go one by one.

 

To add to this the MFT in W7 is allocated in non-contiguous 200k chunks. With a folder record in one, the MFT bitmap in another, and the unused records everywhere, there is a lot of disk thrashing.

 

I don't know the exact mechanics of CC's operations (or even the rough mechanics) but there can be an awful lot of work to be done if the unused records in the MFT are a significant number.

 

On the other hand the allocation of a small number of large files in the WFS operation is simplicity itself, and could be a very much faster operation.

 

I don't know if the WFS option of multiple overwrites applies if WMFT is included in the WFS run. I sincerely hope not. The sooner this anachronistic option is removed the better.

[englishman]

Wipe MFT is an 'add-on' to WFS, so WMFT is not run as a stand-alone exercise, but as a preliminary to WFS. Have you, can you, determine the times for these two separate events?

 

WMFT can be a complex operation. It creates individual small files to fill every unused record in the MFT, and then deletes them. In my MFT there are about 75,000 unused records, so 75k files would need to be created.

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To add to this the MFT in W7 is allocated in non-contiguous 200k chunks. With a folder record in one, the MFT bitmap in another, and the unused records everywhere, there is a lot of disk thrashing.

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Thank you for your detailed reply, Augeus

 

I can determine the WFS elapsed time by running WFS without WMFT and get circa 10 minutes.  I can then run WMFT with WFS and get circa 4 hours.  Hence time for WMFT = 4 hours less 10 minutes.  - Whereas, on my old XP machine, I could literally see WMFT finish in a few minutes and move on to WFS.

 

How do you know how many unused records there are in your MFT ?

 

Do your comments about the Win 7 MFT imply that when you have a relatively new install, one might expect the WMFT to take longer than after a lot of use, because the unused records will be less ?  Also, does the 200k chunk Win 7 MFT architecture suggest a slower process than in XP ?

 

Do any other readers of this post think 4 hours for WMFT in Win 7 seems OK ?

[Augeas]

A normal scan with Recuva will give a count of unused MFT records, as will the analysis phase of Windows defragger.

 

On XP I used to have a relatively small number of unused records, in the low thousands. Then one day I upgraded to Win 8 and now I have 75 thousand unused.

 

I made a teeny error. From Vista onwards the MFT zone is allocated in chunks of 200 mb, and when it fills (with 200,000 records) another zone allocation of 200 mb is allocated: 200k would only give 200 MFT records. Whether you have more than one chunk depends on how many files you have had allocated at any point.

 

Although NTFS as held on the disk is unchanged from XP to Win8, the drivers have changed, and versions after XP possibly do more work, I just don't know what NTFS does at that level. I also don't know what Recuva does, I can only guess. I suppose how much free space you're wiping and the speed of the disk have some effect as well. There are probably hundreds of variables to consider.

 

I've never actually run WMFT, haven't had the need, so I don't have any personal comparisons. I don't suppose you run it frequently, do you?