An NTFS Parser Lib

Introduction

This is a library to help in parsing an NTFS volume, as well as file records and attributes. The readers are assumed to have deep knowledge about NTFS and C++ programming.

I will not introduce NTFS concepts here as the introduction will be either a big animal or nothing at all. Search the best document about NTFS here.

Being an OS fan, I was shameful to have very little knowledge about the file system. Every time I read an OS related book, I was at a loss in the chapter "File System". The contents were either too concise for a deep understanding, or too tedious to keep reading. So I decided to write some short codes to find out what was going on in my hard disk. I picked NTFS as it's the file system in my box, and almost everyone says it's a good design, at least not a bad one.

At first, it was quite painful as there was very little documentation available. Microsoft didn't make its so called "New Technology File System" public. Only pieces of information could be found over the web. After studying the collected documents for some days, the cloud over my head scattered gradually. After some successful testing, I thought it was okay to write a library to facilitate NTFS parsing, also to deepen my knowledge.

Windows NT tries to construct an object oriented Operating System. At the very beginning, I hesitated in choosing whether to use C++ classes or traditional C procedures to fulfill the task. As an important part of the OS, it should be efficient and compact, as well as have scalability and manageability. The OS kernel must be written in C. But I'm writing a user land library, and after studying NTFS data structures thoroughly and carefully, I decided to use C++ classes to encapsulate them.

NTFS is an advanced journaling file system which fits the needs from home PCs to data servers. I haven't implemented all of its features. The following parts are not supported yet:

    Journaling
    Security
    Encryption and compression
    Some other advanced features

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