How can I move the MFT to end of contiguous used space?

I want to move the MFT to end of contiguous used space. Right now it is placed at the middle:

I want to move it to the beginning. How can I do that?

Contrary to other answers, this IS possible, but can be challenging.

Why might you want to do this? Windows often places the MFT in the middle of the disk for historical performance reasons - this can prevent shrinking of a volume as Windows won't shrink the volume beyond un-movable files (of which the MFT is one).

Here's the steps I've just used to move my MFT to allow me to shrink my system volume:

1. Run Disk Cleanup
2. Disable System Restore
3. Disable the page file
4. Disable hibernation
5. Run PerfectDisk (free trial is fine for this purpose) - make sure you do a boot-time defrag - this will move the MFT
6. Run a defrag utility (my preference is Piriform's Defraggler) - after defrag the drive map should now show plenty of free space at the end of the disk
7. Shrink the volume using the Windows Disk Management utility
8. Enable hibernation
9. Enable page file
10. Enable system restore

Hope this helps!

References:

PerfectDisk

Piriform Defraggler

Sysinternals Contig is able to defragment the $MFT file.

When the filesystem is NTFS, contig can also analyse and defragment the following files:
$mft, $LogFile, $Volume, $Attrdef, $Bitmap, $Boot, $BadClus, $Secure, $UpCase, $Extend

Source

UltraDrefrag does not move it to start (talking about $MFT reserved part), it just only defrag $MFT (talking about used $MFT part).

At least with default options in configuration.

If you know how to tell UltraDrefrag to move $MFT reserved part to the start, please post it.

Oh, by the way... try to do it on a 32GiB VHD / VHDX drive mounted while Windows is working (so no risk and is the better proof of concept of working).

But, finally i found a small tool that moves that $MFT reserved zone to the start of the disk (i had used "compact" and "optimize" options, so not sure which one did the tick), it is called: DiskTuna

That tool also let you fully consolidate free space (much more than most other tools like windows native Defrag, Piriform Defraggler, auslogics DiskDefrag, IOBit SmartDefrag, etc).

And it lets you specificy file list patterns to not move (it is a pitty that pattern list is only for defrag option), so you can make videos, music, etc to stay at end of disk by moving them to the end of the disk (with a different tool like Piriform Defraggler).