First, make sure that you have NTFS partition. If you're running Windows 95/98/Me only, you surely don't have one. In NT clone, just open the properties window of the disk you're going to work with and see 'File System' label on 'General' tab.
Then, make sure that you're trying the latest version of NDFF.
Please note that NDFF is command line utility. This means that double clicking it from explorer window would not bring you any sententious result. Run cmd.exe, then type
"full path to the directory the ndff.exe is placed to"\ndff -h
to get help on how to use it.
You don't have to choose them at all. Command line utils used to keep it simple. ;)
Given you have put ndff.exe in c:\some directory. Command (literally):
"c:\some directory\ndff" *.xls
Quotes may be omitted if the path didn't contain spaces.
Given you have put ndff.exe in f:\some directory. Command to search the drive c:
"f:\some directory\ndff" *.xls -d c:
Do the same and show size of the files listed:
"f:\some directory\ndff" *.xls -d c: -ss
More options are listed in the help page and are also documented here. The help page is printed when option -h is specified:
"f:\some directory\ndff" -h
Stop specifying full path every time:
cd "f:\some directory"
ndff -h
This is rather a delicate topic. In short, I did not want to produce an utility at all. My goal is to provide the community of Windows users (myself included) with a feature that Microsoft had not implemented and that is very useful at least for me. Being a software developer, I do not appreciate this feature to be implemented as one of thousands and thousands of other more or less useful utilities with their own GUIs, buttons, etc., buried somewhere deep in the 'Start menu'. I would rather see it integrated into my favourite file managers I usually use to search files on my harddrive.
Therefore, in final release, this utility would look like a .dll or COM/.NET object or C++ static library or all of them together — in other words, a reusable binary that anyone can use to create the software that he or she needs. The form of command line utility is just the simplest user interface to the functions being currently beta tested. But there is only a little chance that GUI would be created before the release of 1.0 — there is too much work to be done besides the interface issues.
Please, report this to me! Please include information about your OS, the NDFF version you use, partition size, and anything you might think can be useful in bughunting.
Locate solves the same problem as NDFF does, but it does it in very different way. Locate first scans the entire volume and stores data about all files in a database (it took 21 MB of disk space for my 30 GB partition and 3.5 minutes to create it). Then, it uses its database for searching. NDFF, on the other hand, does not use any intermediate data. Let's compare them by topics to make differences more obvious.
| Property | NDFF | Locate |
|---|---|---|
| Filesystems supported | NTFS only | All supported by Windows (NTFS, FAT12, FAT16, FAT32, others by means of third party FS drivers) |
| Need for intermediate data and its periodical refresh | NO | YES |
| Always actual search result | YES | Actual for the moment of last database refresh |
| Specifying root of directory subtree to search decreases search time | NO | YES |
NDFF uses standard ways provided by Windows to access the disk. It uses neither port level access, nor driver or BIOS or something else. It just opens the partition as a usual file for read-only access.
Nevertheless, the noise is really heard and with some disks it is really loud. The cause of that noise lies in the special way that the MFT is located on the disk. In order to optimize filesystem performance, the MFT is rarely fragmented file, and in 99.9999% of cases it is true for MFT that two adjacent file clusters are also physically adjacent on the disk. When NDFF searches for a file, it scans the MFT sequentially, record by record, thus making operating system to read it from the disk sector by sector, track by track. There are many tracks (cylinders) to be read from disk to scan the entire MFT, and nearly always they are adjacent ones. This makes hard drive heads to constantly move to the next track and stop there to read the data, and then move again, producing vibration of an invariable frequency. And this vibration is the sound you can hear.
This is just the same sound that you can hear when you run some hard drive benchmarking utility and it performs 'sequential hard drive scan'. During that sound, your drive works in very usual mode and there is nothing destructive in it. The only difference between how the drive operates usually and such an sequential scan operation is that the drive's heads move each time to the next track, staying approximately the same time at each track.
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