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Tech Tips / Windows NT / Disk and File Management

What are those $directories?

Perhaps you're in a clean-up mood and are just itching to delete those directories that start with a dollar sign. In a word, don't even try! Those files hold critical NTFS volume information. Below is a list 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
• $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

It's basically impossible to delete these files anyway, as you can't remove the hidden flag; if you can't remove a file's hidden flag, you can't delete it!