Windows 10: c:\$Mft NTFS Master File Table and c:\$LogFile - sustained high Write B/sec for 20 to 30...

Ever since my Windows 10 Pro upgraded to version 1903 in August last year, it has suffered from lock-up / pregnant pauses of 20 - 30 seconds, seven to ten times per day. It continued to do this with version 1909 currently OS Build 18363.778.

My workstation has reasonably high specs: a 3.5GHz Xeon processor, 32GB of RAM. two fast SSDs 500GB & 1 TB, and a 4TB hard disk.

During the lockups, Task Manager almost always shows Disk usage of 33%. However this seems to be the average over all three drives - with "Disk 0" running at 100%. The Resource Monitor shows high write activity to "C:\$Mft NTFS Master File Table" and "C:\$LogFile NTFS Volume Log" files, by "System" and "RuntimeBroker.exe" and almost zero reads at all . I can sometimes switch between tasks which allows me to check Task Manager & Resource Monitor if I have them open, and use Snipping Tool to take a screen shot. But sometimes everything locks up completely for 20-30 seconds, with the cursor displaying as a rotating circle.

In all cases, there is zero or miniscule read activity across all processes. It seems that the main SSD has been completely commandeered for 'Writes' primarily to these main system files, and there is no spare capacity to read anything from this SSD for the applications that are waiting to do so. This state lasts for 20 - 30 seconds. After that, the writes to "C:\$Mft NTFS Master File Table" and "C:\$LogFile NTFS Volume Log" finish, and things return to normal - except that the sort order of Windows Explorer instances and sometimes multiple browser windows is often trashed see below.

It does not seem to matter what application I am using - the pregnant pauses occur out of the blue in Microsoft and third party applications alike.

I usually work with more than 15 Windows Explorer instances open, displaying various folders that I frequently access for different things during the day. Quite often about 50%, after these pregnant pauses, the sort order of the Explorer windows has been completely trashed. This makes it difficult to quickly find a folder I want to switch into it. I usually finish up closing them all, and then running a script to open all the standard ones again - which gets pretty frustrating several time a day, every day. Quite often, the order of various applications is changed in the Windows Task Bar - which I can live live.

Here below is a screenshot of Task Manager and Resource Monitor, showing a pregnant pause caught in the act.

You can see that Task Manager was showing "33% Disk" - which because this machine has 3 drives means that Drive C: a partition on SSD Drive 0 is working at 100%, and everything else almost is waiting for it to clear. In this screenshot, "RunTimeBroker.exe" is hogging most of the write activity. But I have other screenshots where "System" is doing so. You can see that they both are writing to these files. Extra info: Drive D: is another partition on the same SSD as C:. Drives G: and H: are partitions on the second SSD.

For background understanding of "C:\$Mft NTFS Master File Table", see https://www.ntfs.com/ntfs-mft.htm

What is this instability and corruptions of task / application sort order that seems to have been introduced with version 1903, and not fixed by any Windows Updates since? How can I fix / avoid it?



:)

 

The master file table's (MFT) BITMAP attribute is incorrect.

CHKDSK C: reports the following:

The master file table's (MFT) BITMAP attribute is incorrect.

The Volume Bitmap is incorrect.

Windows has checked the file system and found problems.

Please run chkdsk /scan to find the problems and queue them for repair.

After running CHKDSK C: /scan I ran CHKDSK C: again and got the same result as above.

It seems CHKDSK cannot resolve the master file table's (MFT) BITMAP attribute error.

How do I fix the MFT bitmap error?

 

Master file table (MFT) usage at 100%

Basically im worried that my MFT usage is listed at 100% in the post-defragmentation report after running:

Defrag c: /v

Thx

 

Windows cannot recover master file table. CHKDSK aborted.

I get this error message when I try to fix a hard drive that have not accessible problem with CHKDSK Command anyone have a solution

C:\Windows\system32>chkdsk H: /F
The type of file system is NTFS.
Corrupt master file table. Windows will attempt to recover
master file table from disk.
Windows cannot recover master file table. CHKDSK aborted.