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Credits 27,736 Posts 10,521 Joined 2002-10-09 12:00 23-year member UID 9
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READNTFS is a program for reading files on NTFS partitions, not an NTFS driver, so it doesn’t need to take up that much memory. But I feel NTFSDOS’s programming level is really a bit too poor; otherwise it wouldn’t take up so much memory.
Credits 1,200 Posts 466 Joined 2005-02-01 00:00 21-year member UID 35867 Gender Male From 上海
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Instead of using ReadNTFS, you might as well use Uneraser.
Sigh, NTFS4DOS is better than NTFSDOS, but it doesn’t support Chinese or long filenames. Even if NTFSDOS can’t support Chinese very well, at least it still supports long filenames. But NTFSDOS’s bugs are really too serious.
Windows 9x and FAT have one unique advantage: as long as you boot the machine with a floppy disk, you can access all the hard disk contents from the command line. By the Windows NT/2K/XP era, the default file system became NTFS, and this little bit of magic no longer worked very well—with a Windows 9x boot disk, you simply cannot see NTFS partitions.
There is a free little tool, NTFS Reader for DOS, that can help you. With NTFS Reader for DOS, you can boot the machine with a floppy disk, view any FAT16, FAT32, NTFS4, and NTFS5 disks (including partitions over 8 GB), and copy files to FAT16, FAT32 disk partitions and standard floppy disks (FAT12)—the word “any” here is important. Besides supporting all kinds of older IDE drives, NTFS Reader also supports the latest ATA drives and all SCSI drives. Although its name is NTFS Reader, its main use should actually be copying files from FAT16, FAT32, and NTFS partitions to floppy disks or other devices.
I. Getting to know NTFS Reader
NTFS Reader’s official website is http://www.ntfs.com/products.htm, and major domestic download sites also have it. What you download from the official website is a ZIP file, very small, about 800 KB. After extracting the archive, there are four files inside: two text files, one is the manual and one is the license agreement; the executable file ntfsfloppysetup.exe is used to create a boot disk; the other executable file Readntfs.EXE is the main character introduced in this article, and is only 137 KB in size.
As the name suggests, NTFS Reader for DOS cannot run under Windows; you must use it as follows:
⑴ Create a bootable floppy disk. You can create it with Ntfsfloppysetup.exe, or you can use Windows: in Windows 9x, use the “Add/Remove Programs” function in Control Panel; in Windows XP, right-click the floppy drive and choose “Format”. If you use the latter method, the boot floppy’s version is the Windows Me DOS environment.
⑵ Copy NTFS Reader’s executable file Readntfs.exe to the floppy disk.
⑶ Boot the machine with the floppy disk and run Readntfs.
NTFS Reader’s main window displays an overview of the first hard disk, as in Figure 1. This graphic shows that my test machine has one physical hard disk (HDD 80h), and it has two partitions—the logical disk C: and an unallocated partition (this is actually a small piece of space reserved when partitioning the hard disk, and cannot be used to store data). The right side of the window shows the hard disk’s total number of sectors and total capacity (4 GB).
Figure 1
Click a downward arrow (or press the down arrow key on the keyboard) to view information for a specific volume belonging to that hard disk, as shown in Figure 2. In the right pane, we can see that partition C: is type NTFS, total capacity 3.99 GB, total sectors 8369802, 512 bytes per sector (standard formatting parameters).
Figure 2
In the state shown in Figure 2 where you are viewing the C: partition overview, press Enter to enter the interface for viewing that partition’s contents, as in Figure 3. The right pane lists the contents under the root directory of drive C:. The default display format is divided into four columns: the first column is the DOS 8.3 format filename; press Tab to view the Windows long filename, and press Tab again to return to the DOS 8.3 format filename; the second column is the file size, and if it is a folder, it is displayed as “<>”; the third column is the file attributes, such as archive attribute A, system attribute S, hidden file H, etc.; the fourth and fifth columns are date and time information. In Figure 3, press the up and down arrow keys to scroll/browse the list of files and folders.
Figure 3
II. Viewing files
In the view shown in Figure 3, if the current item is a folder, press Enter to view that folder’s contents; if the current item is a file, press Enter to view its contents.
By default, file contents are displayed in hexadecimal plus ASCII text mode, similar to DEBUG’s display interface. As in Figure 4, the left column is the position of the contents (offset), the middle column is the hexadecimal representation of the file contents, and the right column is the ASCII character form.
Figure 4
In the Figure 4 interface, press Tab to switch to text browsing mode (press ESC to return to the previous interface, that is, the directory listing), as in Figure 5. The figure shows a software manual, but Chinese characters cannot be displayed and only appear as garbled text.
Figure 5
III. Searching for files
The main drawback of this tool is that every time you switch directories, it takes a long time before it can list the directory contents, and this delay is basically unrelated to how much content is in the directory, taking about 5 or 6 seconds. Looking for files under these conditions is undoubtedly very hard work; fortunately NTFS Reader provides a search function, and you can search for files using a complete filename or DOS wildcard format.
In the Figure 2 interface, press Ctrl+F, and a dialog box appears asking you to enter a filename, as in Figure 6. Enter the complete name of the file or a name with wildcards as needed, press Enter, and NTFS Reader starts searching (press ESC to interrupt the search).
Figure 6
After NTFS Reader finds the first matching file, it stops and displays the result (Figure 7). At this point you can press Enter to go to the directory where that file is located, or press Ctrl+F again to continue searching for the next matching file.
Figure 7
IV. Copying files
Of course, many people may use NTFS Reader not just to view files, but to copy files. If you want to copy a file, first press the up and down arrow keys to select it, press Ctrl+C to copy, and a Save In DOS Real Mode dialog box appears, as in Figure 8.
Figure 8
In the Figure 8 interface, press Tab to switch the cursor’s current position. Specify the target file in the Result input field. The Drivers list in the upper right shows the available target drives. This list is different from the drive list in Figure 1: it excludes all non-FAT file system partitions and adds the floppy drive (and network drives, if any). When the target drive contains subdirectories, the Folders list displays the subdirectory listing.
After setting the various options, move the cursor (input focus) to the OK button and press Enter, and the file is copied to the target location. NTFS Reader returns to the directory contents listing interface.
By the way, NTFS Reader can display deleted directories and files that may be recoverable, but it is limited to displaying them; it cannot recover them, nor can it copy deleted files to another disk. Deleted file and directory names have a white square in front of them. For example, in Figure 3, O-G-2 and ORANT-~1 are two deleted directories.
Now, our NTFS Reader tour is over. Due to article length, we have only taken a rough look around NTFS Reader, and many details have not been covered. As compensation, here is one final tip: no matter which interface you are in, pressing ESC always returns you to the previous (or upper-level) interface. If you keep pressing ESC, you will exit NTFS Reader!
[ Last edited by willsort on 2005-8-25 at 19:55 ]
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