Strange warning

Mikey · Post by **Mikey** » Wed Feb 23, 2005 2:54 pm

I have a secondary ( E: ) drive that I installed last year. I occasionally get a warning, in a small box at the same place that those Windows update notices pop up, that says something like

"Windows failed to write file E:$Mft...data may be lost..."

It's always E:$Mft

Does anybody know what this file is or have any idea why this is happening? When it does I need to run chkdsk or the computer runs it automatically on the next startup and I usually have at least one data file corrupted.

BSmack · Post by **BSmack** » Wed Feb 23, 2005 3:10 pm

format E: is your friend.

Mikey · Post by **Mikey** » Wed Feb 23, 2005 3:34 pm

BSmack wrote:format E: is your friend.

Do I need to save my files first?

ElTaco · Post by **ElTaco** » Wed Feb 23, 2005 3:58 pm

Ok so in case you haven't guessed yet, MFT stands for Master File Table and it resides on each HD and keeps track of every file on there. Every time a file is created/written to the disk, its added to this table.

Defragmenting the table and your disk can help
Another problem can be the size of the file. If you add a lot of files on a daily basis, the file can start to eat up a lot of disk space and become defregmented itself. You can try to defrag the whole disk, as well as the MFT and that might help, but if the MFT is too large, the only option is to back up the data and format the disk. This only seems to be a problem when you store a lot of small files. Your disk might also be a problem but a complete run of chkdsk should tell you if it finds problems and should fix it.

Shlomart Ben Yisrael · Fri Feb 25, 2005 1:02 am

Is the disk by chance a FAT32 partition?

Also is DMA enabled for that particular IDE Channel?

It could help.