Salvage those NTFS files with NTFS Reader for DOS

By Faithe Wempen, Special to ZDNet Asia
Wednesday, September 03 2003 12:01 PM

One of the simple joys of FAT and Windows 9x is that when everything starts going wrong, you can boot with a startup floppy and straighten it all out via the command line. But that's typically not possible with a Windows NT/2000/XP system. These operating systems use the NTFS file system, not FAT or FAT32. When you boot an NTFS system using a Windows 9x startup floppy, the NTFS drives don't appear to exist. You can boot into the Recovery Console for a command prompt, but depending on security settings, it might not give you access to the entire drive. Although you can run certain repair utilities from the Recovery Console, you might not be able to copy important data files off the disk.

One workaround is to use a freeware utility called NTFS Reader for DOS (also available at most major shareware sites). This utility allows you to view the contents of any hard disk that uses FAT16, FAT32, NTFS4, or NTFS5 (including drives over 8 GB) and to copy files from the disk to any FAT16 or FAT32 hard disk or to a standard floppy disk (FAT12). The part about "any" hard disk is significant. This utility also supports old IDE drives, the latest ATA drives, and all SCSI drives. And although it's billed as an NTFS reader, it could also conceivably be used to transfer files from FAT16 or FAT32 volumes to floppies or other drives as well.

Starting it up
NTFS Reader for DOS won't run under Windows, so if you want to try it out, you must perform the following tasks:

Create a bootable floppy disk. In Windows 9x, use Add/Remove Programs. You can also make a very basic floppy in Windows XP from the Format dialog box for the floppy drive. (If you do the latter, you'll get a floppy containing the IO.sys, MSDOS.sys, and Command.com from Windows Me.)
Copy the executable file, Readntfs.exe, to the floppy.
Boot from the floppy to a command prompt and type readntfs.

The main window that appears lists the stats for the first hard disk as a whole. Click the down arrow to see the statistics for a particular volume on that hard disk, as shown in Figure A.

Figure A

NTFS Reader for DOS reports the stats on an NTFS volume.

Viewing the files
To view the files on a volume, press [Enter]. The program scans the disk and then presents the top-level content. The scanning process takes about 10 seconds and recurs each time you change directories. Figure B shows the top-level directory listing for an NTFS volume. From here, you can select a subfolder (using the arrow keys) and press [Enter] to move into it, or you can select an individual file.

Figure B