Working with windows Functions for Recovering Shift+Delete files

Question

I am making software for recovering Shift+Delete files from Windows. I know when files are deleted only links to them are cut off by Windows but the actual file remains there at the same place, so recovering them would require myself to search hard-drive or specifically a particular drive.

I installed the code on an old computer with Windows Millennium Edition and works. How can I make it workable for Windows 7?? Are there any API's or references for this that will be helpful?

Answer 1

First of all, you'll need to run it as Administrator to get raw access to the drive. Secondly, your code that runs on Windows ME likely works with FAT filesystems (and their variants). For Windows NT-based OSes (i.e. Windows 7) you'll need to write something that understand NTFS.

NTFS is much more complicated than FAT. Worse, there's no public specification - it's Microsoft proprietary. Having said that, some people have spent a lot of time reverse-engineering it already (you'll find more with a bit more googling as well). You can also find source code for an NTFS driver in the Linux source, but that will likely be of relatively limited use for a data recovery tool.

Good luck!