I have about 50% of the "used" space on my hard disk taken up in what is showing as "reserved system space",(one version of Diskeeper Lite calls it "MFT space" on my NT system). That is a little over 25% of my total disk size. I've read that if a hard drive is converted to NTFS from previously being formatted in FAT32 that this "system space" is reserved and created.....But 25%??? That seems really excessive!...and I'd like to reduce it. Is there any way to reduce this without 3rd party programs? (It is hogging WAY too much space that I'd like to use)

It is unusual to have the MFT take up that much space. It is usually handled automatically by the NT OS. On one of my NTFS drives, 1.6GB, less than 240MB is taken up by the Reserved MFT Space I seem to remember reading Q articles on the MS support web site regarding how to manipulate the size (through registry entries). Sorry, don't remember the specific article numbers, never had problems with the MFT size.

When an NTFS drive is created in NT the OS claims an amount of spce for 'system files' which basically is room for the MFT to expand into. But, as the drive becomes full and the amount of free space reduces NT will create files within this 'reserved' space anyway rather than run out of space completely. I maust admit though, 25% of the total space does seem excessive!