dumping the content of the $mft file

Question

for some commercial project I'm doing I need to be able to read the actual data stored on the $mft file.

I found a gpl lib that could help, but since its gpl i can't integrate it into my code.

could someone please point me to a project that i could use / or point me at the relevant windows API (something that doesn't require 1000 lines of code to implement)

BTW, why doesn't windows simply allow me to read the mft file directly anyway? (through the create file and the read method, if i want to ruin my drive it's my business not Ms's).

thanks.

Answer 1

You just have to open a handle to the volume using CreateFile() on \.\X: where X is the drive letter (check the MSDN documentation on CreateFile(), it mentions this in the Remarks section).

Read the first sector into a NTFS Boot Record structure (you can find it online, search for Richard "Flatcap" Russon, edit: I found it, http://www.flatcap.org/ntfs/ntfs/files/boot.html ). One of the fields in the boot sector structure gives the start location of the MFT in clusters (LCN of VCN 0 of the $MFT), you have to do a SetFilePointer() to that location an read in multiples of sectors. The first 1024 bytes from that location is the file record of the $MFT, again you can parse this structure to find the data attribute which is always non-resident and it's size is the actual size of the MFT file at that time.

The basic structures for $Boot, File Record and basic attributes (Standard Information, File Name and Data) along with the parsing code should run you less than 1000 lines of code.

Answer 2

This is not going to be a trivial proposition. You'll likely have to roll your own code solution to accomplish this. You can get some info about the details of the $MFT by checking out http://www.ntfs.com/ntfs-mft.htm

Another option is to spend some time looking through the source code to the opensource project NTFS-3g. You can download the source from http://www.tuxera.com/community/ntfs-3g-download/

Another good project is the NTFSProgs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ntfsprogs

Good luck.