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There are files beginning with $ at the root of my NTFS drive, can I delete them?
John Savill
January 8, 2000
1 Min Read
A. A. NO!!! These files hold the information of your NTFS volume. Below is a table of all the files used by the file system:
$MFT | Master File Table |
$MFTMIRR | A copy of the first 16 records of the MFT |
$LOGFILE | Log of changes made to the volume |
$VOLUME | Information about the volume, serial number, creation time, dirty flag |
$ATTRDEF | Attribute definitions |
$BITMAP | Contains drive cluster map |
$BOOT | Boot record of the drive |
$BADCLUS | A list of bad clusters on the drive |
$QUOTA | Quota information (used on NTFS 5.0) |
$UPCASE | Maps lowercase characters to uppercase version |
If you want to have a look at any of these files use the command
dir /ah $mft
Its basically impossible to delete these files anyway as you can't remove the hidden flag and if you can't remove the hidden flag you can't delete it!
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