Free mft software for windows

MyDefrag 4.1.1 introduces innovative, easy to use features to make your harddisk faster. It is freeware, with no time limit, and is fully functional with no advertisements. It is fast, with low overhead and many optimization strategies. It can handle floppies, USB disks, memory sticks, and anything else that looks like a disk to Windows. Included are a set of easy-to-use scripts for endusers, a scripting engine for demanding users, a screensaver, and a combined Windows plus command-line version that can be scheduled by the Windows task scheduler or for use from administrator scripts.

MyDefrag is extremely solid because it is based on the standard defragmentation API by Microsoft, a system library that is included in Windows 2000, 2003, XP, Vista, and 2008. Most defragmenters are based on this API, including the free defragmenter that comes with Windows and many commercial defragmenters. Basically all MyDefrag does is send "move this file to that location" commands to the API. The API is part of the operating system and can safely move almost any file on the disk, without risk and while the computer is in full use.

Defragmention: Imagine a book split into several parts, some pages are over here, other pages in another room on another floor altogether. You will have to walk a lot when you need to read the book. It may sound silly, but this is exactly what happens to files on your harddisk. Defragmentation will put all the parts (fragments) back together, making your computer a lot faster.
Optimization: Imagine a big library with lots of books, spread out all over the building and not sorted whatsoever. There is an index telling you exactly where every book is, but you will have to walk a lot when you need several books. This is exactly what happens on your harddisk, the files that belong to an application can be all over the place, anywhere on the harddisk. Optimization will bring all the files together in one place, leaving the rest of the harddisk empty, and will sort the files, for example alphabetically.

Defragmentation and optimization will not only make a harddisk faster, but also lengthen it's life span, because the disk will have less work to do and therefore have less wear and tear. Also, it will refresh and strengthen the magnetic data on the harddisk by simply reading the (weakened) data and writing it afresh. However, defragmenting and optimizing is work, so excessive defragmenting and optimizing can actually cause more wear and tear than it prevents.

Major Features:

1. On most harddisks the beginning of the harddisk is considerably faster than the end, sometimes by as much as 200 percent! You can measure this yourself with utilities such as HD Tune. MyDefrag is therefore geared towards moving all files to the beginning of the disk.
2. MyDefrag organizes files into zones, such as directories, Windows files, files used while booting, regular files, and rarely used files. The most accessed files are placed at the beginning of the harddisk, and files that are commonly used together are placed in close proximity to each other. This results in a dramatic speed increase, and is in fact more important than defragmentation. The program comes with scripts with a zone organization suitable for most users, power users can customize the zones through scripts.
3. Sorting the files on your disk can give you even more speed. There are several sorting strategies to choose from. Most of them will take a lot of data shuffling, taking a lot of time for MyDefrag to complete, and therefore should only be used occasionally.
4. A running computer will create and delete temporary files like there is no tomorrow. If the harddisk were completely optimized then the only place for new temporary files would be behind all the other data. Which is rather slow. MyDefrag can maintain free spaces at various locations on the disk to make temporary files faster.
5. Windows reserves a percentage on NTFS disks for the MFT (Master File Table), but can place normal files there if the rest of the disk is full. The files will remain there, even when there is enough space again. MyDefrag can look for files in the NTFS reserved areas and move them to normal diskspace, making the reserved areas available again for the MFT.

Enhancements:

• Optimized the subroutine that searches for contiguous fragments.
• Fixed a bug that would prevent the program from running (immediate finish) without a proper error message, if there was a directory called "Settings" anywhere in the path. Also added some extra error messages in case there is a problem executing a script.
• Optimized the subroutine that vacates items out of the way.
• Disabled the OtherInstances(ask) setting for the screensaver.
• The "F1" key now looks for the manual in the installpath, instead of always using "C:Program FilesMyDefrag v4.XManual.chm".

Requirements: Windows 2000, 2003, XP, Vista, 2008, and for X64.

Securely overwrite your sensitive files and cleanse your free space of previously deleted files One feature of Windows NT/2000s (Win2K) C2-compliance is that it implements object reuse protection. This means that when an application allocates file space or virtual memory it is unable to view data that was previously stored in the resources Windows NT/2K allocates for it. Windows NT zero-fills memory and zeroes the sectors on disk where a file is placed before it presents either type of resource to an application. However, object reuse does not dictate that the space that a file occupies before it is deleted be zeroed. This is because Windows NT/2K is designed with the assumption that the operating system controls access to system resources. However, when the operating system is not active it is possible to use raw disk editors and recovery tools to view and recover data that the operating system has deallocated. Even when you encrypt files with Win2Ks Encrypting File System (EFS), a files original unencrypted file data is left on the disk after a new encrypted version of the file is created.
The only way to ensure that deleted files, as well as files that you encrypt with EFS, are safe from recovery is to use a secure delete application. Secure delete applications overwrite a deleted files on-disk data using techiques that are shown to make disk data unrecoverable, even using recovery technology that can read patterns in magnetic media that reveal weakly deleted files. SDelete (Secure Delete) is such an application. You can use SDelete both to securely delete existing files, as well as to securely erase any file data that exists in the unallocated portions of a disk (including files that you have already deleted or encrypted). SDelete implements the Department of Defense clearing and sanitizing standard DOD 5220.22-M, to give you confidence that once deleted with SDelete, your file data is gone forever. SDelete is presented with full source code so that you can verify yourself that it works as advertized. Note that SDelete securely deletes file data, but not file names located in free disk space.
SDelete is a command line application which takes a number of options. In any given use, it helps you delete one or more files and/or directories, or to cleanse the free space on a logical disk. SDelete accepts wild card characters as part of the directory or file specifier.
Usage: sdelete [-p passes] [-s] [-q]
sdelete [-p passes] -z [drive letter]
-p passes
Specifies number of overwrite passes
-s
Recurse subdirectories
-q
Dont print errors (quiet)
-z
Cleanse free space
Securely deleting a file that has no special attributes is relatively straight-forward: the secure delete program simply overwrites the file with the secure delete pattern. What is more tricky is securely deleting Windows NT/2K compressed, encrypted and sparse files, and securely cleansing disk free spaces.
Compressed, encrypted and sparse are managed by NTFS in 16-cluster blocks. If a program writes to an existing portion of such a file NTFS allocates new space on the disk to store the new data and after the new data has been written, deallocates the clusters previously occupied by the file. NTFS takes this conservative approach for reasons related to data integrity, and in the case of compressed and sparse files, in case a new allocation is larger than what exists (the new compressed data is bigger than the old compressed data). Thus, overwriting such a file will not succeed in deleting the files contents from the disk.
To handle these types of files SDelete relies on the defragmentation API. Using the defragmentation API SDelete can determine precisely which clusters on a disk are occupied by data belonging to compressed, sparse and encrypted files. Once SDelete knows which clusters contain the files data, it can open the disk for raw access and overwrite those clusters.
Cleaning free space presents another challenge. Since FAT and NTFS provide no means for an application to directly address free space, SDelete has one of two options. The first is that it can, like it does for compressed, sparse and encrypted files, open the disk for raw access and overwrite the free space. This approach suffers from a big problem: even if SDelete were coded to be fully capable of calculating the free space portions of NTFS and FAT drives (something thats not trivial), it would run the risk of collision with active file operations taking place on the system. For example, say SDelete determines that a cluster is free, and just at that moment the file system driver (FAT, NTFS) decides to allocate the cluster for a file that another application is modifying. The file system driver writes the new data to the cluster, and then SDelete comes along and overwrites the freshly written data: the files new data is gone. The problem is even worse if the cluster is allocated for file system metadata since SDelete will corrupt the file systems on-disk structures.
The second approach, and the one SDelete takes, is to indirectly overwrite free space. First, SDelete allocates the largest file it can. SDelete does this using non-cached file I/O so that the contents of the NT file system cache will not be thrown out and replaced with useless data associated with SDeletes space-hogging file. Because non-cached file I/O must be sector (512-byte) aligned, there might be some left over space that isnt allocated for the SDelete file even when SDelete cannot further grow the file. To grab any remaining space SDelete next allocates the largest cached file it can. For both of these files SDelete performs a secure overwrite, ensuring that all the disk space that was previously free becomes securely cleansed.
On NTFS drives SDeletes job isnt necessarily through after it allocates and overwrites the two files. SDelete must also fill any existing free portions of the NTFS MFT (Master File Table) with files that fit within an MFT record. An MFT record is typically 1KB in size, and every file or directory on a disk requires at least one MFT record. Small files are stored entirely within their MFT record, while files that dont fit within a record are allocated clusters outside the MFT. All SDelete has to do to take care of the free MFT space is allocate the largest file it can - when the file occupies all the available space in an MFT Record NTFS will prevent the file from getting larger, since there are no free clusters left on the disk (they are being held by the two files SDelete previously allocated). SDelete then repeats the process. When SDelete can no longer even create a new file, it knows that all the previously free records in the MFT have been completely filled with securely overwritten files.
To overwrite file names of a file that you delete, SDelete renames the file 26 times, each time replacing each character of the files name with a successive alphabetic character. For instance, the first rename of "foo.txt" would be to "AAA.AAA".
The reason that SDelete does not securely delete file names when cleaning disk free space is that deleting them would require direct manipulation of directory structures. Directory structures can have free space containing deleted file names, but the free directory space is not available for allocation to other files. Hence, SDelete has no way of allocating this free space so that it can securely overwrite it.

Quick Recovery is a do-it-yourself non-destructive data recovery software. There are just two steps to perform the complete operation. Analysis, Select & Save. Analysis is the most important aspect of data recovery. Quick Recoverys unique Guided File Excavation Technology (GFETCh) helps in locating files and folders lost behind overwritten partitions too.
Why Quick Recovery is the Best Data Recovery Software for you ?
? Quick and Automated Analysis
? Fast Recovery Process
? Four Levels of Recovery Mode
? Unique Guided File Excavation Technology (GFETch)
? Simple and well Guided Steps to Recover Data
? Simulates Previously Existed Partitions
? Recovers even if Bad Sectors hinder Drive Access
? Options to Search for various File Types, Partitions, FAT/MFT Manually
? View and Browse through Sectors in various Formats
? Exhaustive Search Methods that are Helpful in Forensics
? Long File Name Conversion after Recovery
? Recovery from Damaged Floppies
? All Recovery cases possible that have been experienced by Unistal have been incorporated
? Developed by our experienced data recovery experts themselves

Proven by NSTL to be 300-500% faster and much more thorough than manual, built-in defragmenters like the one in Windows 2000.
NEW! Diskeeper 6.0 Second Edition features a Microsoft recommended lightning fast boot-time defrag for critical MFT and Paging Files. Built-in defragmenters can?t touch them Tested by NSTL to increase and maintain system performance 56%-81%, even more on Window 2000. Evaluated by IDC to extend the productive life of servers and workstations by up to two years. Dramatically reduce Help Desk calls and lowers overall network budget?without effort. Completely automatic and transparent, runs while system is up and running without affecting productivity. Diskeeper is the best selling and most recommended automatic disk defragmenter ever built.

PhotoRec is file data recovery software designed to recover lost files including video, documents and archives from Hard Disks and CDRom and lost pictures (thus, its 'Photo Recovery' name) from digital camera memory. PhotoRec ignores the filesystem and goes after the underlying data, so it will still work even if your media's filesystem has been severely damaged or re-formatted.
PhotoRec is free, this open source multi-platform application is distributed under GNU Public License. PhotoRec is a companion program to TestDisk, an app for recovering lost partitions on a wide variety of filesystems and making non-bootable disks bootable again.
For more safety, PhotoRec uses read-only access to handle the drive or memory support you are about to recover lost data from. Important: As soon as a pic or file is accidentally deleted, or you discover any missing, do NOT save any more pics or files to that memory device or hard disk drive; otherwise you may overwrite your lost data. This means that even using PhotoRec, you must not choose to write the recovered files to the same partition they were stored on.

Photorec ignores the filesystem, this way it works even if the filesystem is severely damaged. It can recover lost files at least from:

• FAT,
• NTFS,
• EXT2/EXT3 filesystem
• HFS+