changing the computer's setting won't affect any existing volumes straight away
sure as hell it won't. In fact, there seems to be no way whatsoever to reduce the MFT reserved clusters size short of reformatting the volume in question. In case somebody knows how to do it, I'm all ears.
I encountered the problem when checking my VMWare virtual machine harddisk space. Running chkdsk returns
11.533.072 KB
but Windows Explorer, cmd dir etc. return 19.6 GB! Who ate the missing space? Who done it?! Google, of course, knows nothing. Wanna-be experts will tell you to enable hidden files in Explorer, delete hiberfil.sys, whatever. Nonsense, of course, all of it. So, finally, I come across the keyword $mft. So I check:
fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo c:
surprise!
Total Reserved Clusters: 1.820.556 (6,9 GB)
Reserved for Storage Reserve: 1.809.957 (6,9 GB)
There you are, you naughty lost space! So this was checked on Windows Enterprise 20H2 10.0.19042.804 x64 inside VMWare. To compare, I check the same on my real harddisk, Windows LTSC 10.0.10240 x86. Output:
Total Reserved Clusters: 0x0000000000000d30
Well, talking about Windows Updates! They sure did revamp the fsutil command in the last 5 years! Whatever, xd30 == 3.376 clusters, while 20H2 reserved 1.820.556 clusters -> 6.9 GB! So... how to reclaim? Checking Google, the wanna-be experts opened their pathetic mouths again! Just defragment your harddisk, they say, and the problem will be gone! Gone my ar*e! Defrag just defragments the MFT, it doesn't reduce the reserved size.
So, great. Means, backup, format EVERYTHING, restore. Of course, problems all over. So first, backup:
Mount the Win10 ISO (*.esd can be converted to ISO, as far as I know, but I've got an ISO here) into VMWare as a DVD-Drive
Attach a second harddisk. Why? Well, you just read on.
Now boot into boot.wim, do:
dism /Capture-Image /ImageFile:XXX:\six.wim /CaptureDir:XXX:\ /Name:Win10 /ConfigFile:XXX:\peexclude.ini /Compress:fast /Verify
where peexclude.ini includes bullsh*t like
\$Recycle.Bin
\RECYCLER
\System Volume Information
\pagefile.sys
Error 80: The file exists
Errr... Error what?! Well, that's the MS cryptic way of telling you dism ran out of memory. This never happened to me on my real pc, since I have 4GB memory on my old pc and 32 GB on my new one, but currently, I'm running on my old PC, 4 GB - 500 MB reserved to hardware, since x86, so
wmic os get freephysicalmemory, totalvisiblememorysize
FreePhysicalMemory TotalVisibleMemorySize
2415424 3644720
So I could only assign 1.5 GB to VMWare, not enough. So need "ScratchDir", hence another harddisk needed:
mkdir XXX:\tmp
... /ScratchDir:XXX:\tmp
Fine, so Win dism-ed the harddisk, I then booted into the virtual guest and copied the *.wim backup to my real harddisk using VMWare Tools (shared folders -> HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\vmhgfs ). Then, on real machine:
oscdimg -u2 -h -o -m -us -r "c:\copy\test" "d:\copy\burn.iso"
So basically, creating an ISO containing the *.wim to restore.
Mounted the 20H2 install media into VMWare again as DVD-Drive, same with the ISO containing the Windows backup as another DVD-Drive. Booted into boot.wim on the Win installation media again, then:
format /fs:ntfs /v:XXX /q c:
Invalid volume name...
Invalid what??!! Let's check:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/format
/v:<label>
Well, Microsoft says, syntax is right, but format command itself says it's wrong. Go figure. So dropped the label parameter, this one worked. Format asked for volume name twice. Once is not enough, it seems. Annoooooying! Damn this weird command! Restored the VMWare snapshot, tried using the diskpart format subcommand instead:
diskpart
select disk 0
select partition 1
format fs=ntfs quick label=XXX
Volume in use. Use "override"
Err.. over-what? Like this?
format fs=ntfs quick label=XXX override
Look, it did it! Lucky guess. Checked the Total Reserved Clusters size again, size was decent, 4 MB or something like that. So tried to restore the wim image:
dism /Apply-Image /ImageFile:XXX:\six.wim /Index:1 /ApplyDir:XXX:\ /Verify
Error 1450: "Insufficient system resources exist to complete the requested service"
That's it! I'm going home! No more dism-ing for me! Well, at least, this time the error was more clear. Ran out of memory again. So I assigned 1.6 GB to VMware, which left my real Windows without memory, trousers down, not that the virtual guest cares about my problems. This time it worked. Rebooted virtual Windows, checked harddisk space in Explorer:
> 12.087 GB
Now we are talking. Checked the Reserved Clusters:
Total Reserved Clusters: 13.360 (52,2 MB)
Reserved for Storage Reserve: 0 ( 0,0 KB)
Finally! Also, check the values in:
HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem
I really would like to know what reserved 7 GB for MFT originally. Plus, I still have no idea how to reduce the MFT reserved size short of re-formatting. Microsoft? Anybody?
