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I have the super descriptive "my computer is slow" issue. In resource manager I notice that c:\$LogFile access times are continuously around 800 ms, and I suspect this is causing much of the slowdown. At How do you defragment the MFT on an NTFS disk? I found that contig could - in theory - help. In practice though, running contig $LogFile in a cmd window run as administrator gives me

Contig v1.7 - Makes files contiguous
Copyright (C) 1998-2012 Mark Russinovich
Sysinternals - www.sysinternals.com

------------------------
Access is denied.

No files fragmented.

$Bitmap, $Boot, and $BadClus also give me Access is denied.

$Mft, $Volume, $AttrDef, $Secure, $UpCase and $Extend work fine.

How can I work around this? Can I attach this disk to a different machine, not mount in some way, and defrag those files from there? If so, how would that work? Or are there simpler ways to do the same?

Community
  • 1
Martijn
  • 3,342

4 Answers4

2

The $Logfile is a special NTFS system file. It is a circular log of all disk operations and is used to safely roll back unsuccessful disk operations. The file has a fixed size and is allocated when the disk is formatted. It cannot be deleted, moved, or defragmented.

The "chkdsk" Windows commandline utility can show and change the size of the $Logfile. Making the $Logfile bigger will not move it, but will append a new fragment. Making the $Logfile smaller will remove fragments from the end.

CHKDSK c: /L:XXX   
where XXX is the size in KB. /L without a size will show info.

You could try setting a smaller size temporarily, defrag and then resize it again.

Marcelo
  • 908
0

$LogFile records write operations on the hard disk and cannot be moved or defragmented. Its access can only be slow if :

  1. Your disk is slowing down, or
  2. Many writes are being done to files.

In the first case, your hard disk is dying.

In the second case, some software is busily writing to the disk.

Some ideas for the second hypothesis are :

  1. Run Task Manager and watch the "I/O Writes" column for processes
  2. Boot in Safe mode. If the slow-down disappears, then some installed program is to blame. You could use Autoruns to turn off startups until you find it.
  3. Disable disk indexing
  4. Disable Windows Media Sharing
  5. Disable the antivirus
  6. See if the antivirus is set to examine every open of a file
harrymc
  • 498,455
-1

UltimateDefrag claims it can defrag all files as well as move/position any file whereever you want, change MFT size, etc. (Versión 5 i think).

The couterpart: It is paid software, not freeware.

So i can assume, some time in the future, maybe someone freeware will do the same.

Anonymous
  • 1
-1

If you suspect a hardware failure, I would suggest booting with a Trinity Rescue Kit and performing hardware tests and scans with the software provided in that kit.

You will not be able to defragment system files that are in use. I would recommend rebooting into safe mode to minimize the number of files in use to allow the defragmenter to work efficiently.

  1. Reboot into Safe Mode
  2. While in safe mode, clear your temps and caches (right click on the drive in explorer and go to tools, use the cleanup)
  3. While in safe mode, defragment.

I would also suggest the freeware Defraggler

Jay M
  • 198