I have installed RH9 on A Dell Inspiron laptop running XP on NTFS. Was only able to get XP partition down to 33Meg (of 60) because there was a small block of unmovable files in the middle of the drive. I understand that this is a mirror of the MFT which is stuck in the middle of the drive for backup purposes.

Can I delete this? Would like to bring the xp partition down to around 10Mb but cannot do so whilst this unmoveable block remains at around 33Mb. If i manually overwrite this copy of the MFT, when i reboot will ntfs then automatically recreate it in the middle of the (now much smaller) drive with no damage done?

Alternatively is there anyway I can move this file? Defrag doesnt touch it of course.

Thanks in advance.

What software were you using to shrink the partition? Perhaps you should try partition magic, it usualy doesnt care what the file is, just moving it

was using the partition tool with mandrake 9.1. it wouldnt go past this point. do not have partition magic but can it move 'unmoveable system files' (which is what the mft normally shows up as)?

Last time I used partition magic it moved everything... its been a while.. lol

Other than that. Before I had the option of kazaa'ing a copy of partition magic, I used log into windows. Search for files named * that way it would find every file on the drive.

Once its done finding them all. Click on one of the files, then hit, CTRL-A to select all files. With all files selected, right click on and select properties. Then, uncheck the "Read-Only" and "Archive" buttons, and Defrag should be able to move everything on the drive.

MFT is the Master File Table and is part of the NT File System. Don't think you can see it in windows - even under command line interface. Pls see links for info.

http://www.ntfs.com/ntfs-mft.htm

http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/ntfs/help/layout.html