gomft

gomft is Go library to parse the Master File Table (MFT) of NFTS volumes. mftdump is a utility to dump the MFT of a mounted volume to a file.

Example usage reading MFT records from a file that was previously dumped with a record size of 1KB:

package main

import (
	"errors"
	"io"
	"log"
	"os"

	"github.com/t9t/gomft/mft"
)

func main() {
	f, err := os.Open(os.Args[1])
	if err != nil {
		log.Fatalln("Unable to open file", err)
	}
	defer f.Close()

	recordSize := 1024
	for {
		buf := make([]byte, recordSize)
		_, err := io.ReadFull(f, buf)
		if err != nil {
			if errors.Is(err, io.EOF) {
				break
			}
			log.Fatalln("Unable to read record data", err)
		}

		record, err := mft.ParseRecord(buf)
		if err != nil {
			log.Fatalln("Unable to parse MFT record", err)
		}

		log.Println("Read MFT record", record.FileReference)
	}
}

See also: https://godoc.org/github.com/t9t/gomft/mft

Reading from a raw volume

To read from a raw volume, you have to be root (*nix) or Administrator (Windows). In *nix you can just use the partition device file name (eg. /dev/sda1) while in Windows you have to use an UNC path such as \\.\C:. All the rest is the same as accessing a file (ie. os.Open(...)).

Note that on Windows you can only read data in multiples of the sector size, so if the sector size is 512 bytes (which is most common), you can read 512, 1024, 1536, etc bytes at a time but not 768 for instance. Keep this in mind when using a buffered reader, making sure the buffer size is a multiple of the sector size.

Reading the boot sector

To read the boot sector (also known as VBR, Volume Boot Record, or $Boot file) of a volume you can use the bootsect package:

package main

import (
	"io"
	"log"
	"os"

	"github.com/t9t/gomft/bootsect"
)

func main() {
	f, err := os.Open(`\\.\C:`)
	if err != nil {
		log.Fatalln("Unable to open C:", err)
	}
	defer f.Close()

	buf := make([]byte, 512)
	_, err = io.ReadFull(f, buf)
	if err != nil {
		log.Fatalln("Unable to read bootsector data", err)
	}

	bootSector, err := bootsect.Parse(buf)
	if err != nil {
		log.Fatalln("Unable to parse boot sector")
	}

	log.Printf("Boot sector of C:\\:\n%+v\n", bootSector)
}

See: https://godoc.org/github.com/t9t/gomft/bootsect

Additional utilities

Fragment reader

Use the fragment package to read fragmented data, for example as obtained from DataRuns in MFT records. Use mft.DataRunsToFragments() to translate DataRuns into fragments.

See: https://godoc.org/github.com/t9t/gomft/fragment

bintuil & BinReader

The binutil package contains some functions to help using binary data, primarily binutil.Duplicate() to duplicate a slice of bytes and BinReader to interpret binary data according to a certain byte order (little/big endian).

See: https://godoc.org/github.com/t9t/gomft/binutil

utf16

The utf16 package contains the DecodeString function to decode a byte slice to a string using a certain byte order.

See: https://godoc.org/github.com/t9t/gomft/utf16

Disclaimer

This package is far from complete and the implementation scrambled together from various bits of (often conflicting) information strewn about the internet.

Use at your own risk! Accessing your raw volumes could damage your data beyond repair if you are not careful! It's probably best to dump your MFT to a file and experiment with that rather than reading your raw volumes directly.

mftdump

The mftdump utility can be used to dump the MFT of a raw volume to a file. Download it in the releases section.

Usage:

usage: mftdump [flags] <volume> <output file>

Dump the MFT of a volume to a file. The volume should be NTFS formatted.

Flags:
  -f    force; overwrite the output file if it already exists
  -p    progress; show progress during dumping
  -v    verbose; print details about what's going on

For example: mftdump -v -f /dev/sdb1 ~/sdb1.mft

On Windows, use it like this: mftdump.exe -v -f C: D:\c.mft

References

In no particular order, these pages and programs have helped me build gomft.

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS#Master_File_Table
• http://www.kcall.co.uk/ntfs/index.html
• https://web.archive.org/web/20210922203602/https://flatcap.org/linux-ntfs/ntfs/index.html
• https://web.archive.org/web/20200220141834/https://www.cse.scu.edu/~tschwarz/coen252_07Fall/Lectures/NTFS.html
• https://www.autoitscript.com/forum/topic/94269-mft-access-reading-parsing-the-master-file-table-on-ntfs-filesystems/
• https://www.andreafortuna.org/2017/07/18/how-to-extract-data-and-timeline-from-master-file-table-on-ntfs-filesystem/
• http://ftp.kolibrios.org/users/Asper/docs/NTFS/ntfsdoc.html
• https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/master-file-table
• https://flylib.com/books/en/2.48.1/ntfs_concepts.html
• "A Journey into NTFS"
  • Part 1: https://medium.com/@bromiley/a-journey-into-ntfs-part-1-e2ac6a6367ec
  • Part 2: https://medium.com/@bromiley/ntfs-series-2b3b91faaf21
  • Part 3: https://medium.com/@bromiley/a-journey-into-ntfs-part-3-5e197a0cab58
  • Part 4: https://medium.com/@bromiley/a-journey-into-ntfs-part-4-f2865c39ac83
  • Part 5: https://medium.com/@bromiley/ntfs-part-5-13e20588af59
  • Part 6: https://medium.com/@bromiley/ntfs-part-6-43a50fad89f3
  • Part 7: https://medium.com/@bromiley/ntfs-part-7-an-ntfs-story-caf42565855b
• https://github.com/dkovar/analyzeMFT
• https://github.com/jschicht/Mft2Csv
• https://github.com/libyal/libfsntfs/blob/master/documentation/New%20Technologies%20File%20System%20(NTFS).asciidoc