My company is developing a crash recovery application, for this we need
direct access to NTFS partitions (before booting Windows). We contacted
Microsoft Spain for information about licensing of the NTFS
specificaction, but they don’t know of any license terms.
Who can we apply to for this?
Depending on what exactly you are doing, it isn’t clear to me that you
need a license from Microsoft, unless you are looking to license code
(which I think will be a very tough road). What you need (I suspect) is
the file system format. There are a number of folks that have written
tools that access the file system directory through disk i/o. For
example, the folks at http://www.sysinternals.com have an NTFS utility
for MS-DOS and Windows 98. You can also look at sites like
http://www.ntfs.com etc. I think this route might be what you should
explore. What you need is knowledge, not a legal license. No matter
what you do - please keep in mind that Microsoft will continue to evolve
NTFS - and any product you develop that is using disk level formats for
one operating system may not work on the next version.
-----Original Message-----
From: Jose M. Rus [mailto:xxxxx@interactivity.es]
Sent: Tuesday, June 17, 2003 5:41 AM
To: File Systems Developers
Subject: [ntfsd] NTFS specification
My company is developing a crash recovery application, for this we need
direct access to NTFS partitions (before booting Windows). We contacted
Microsoft Spain for information about licensing of the NTFS
specificaction, but they don’t know of any license terms.
Who can we apply to for this?
You are currently subscribed to ntfsd as: xxxxx@exagrid.com
To unsubscribe send a blank email to xxxxx@lists.osr.com
Yes, we don’t need any source code, only information about the format of
NTFS. Microsoft
made publicly available the specification, only data, of FAT32
(http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/hwdev/hardware/fatgen.mspx). We need
something
similar for NTFS, that Microsoft licenses under some terms.
The problem with www.ntfs.com or www.sysinternals is that they obtain
information
by reverse engineering, so they miss a big part of NTFS.
Depending on what exactly you are doing, it isn’t clear to me that you
need a license from Microsoft, unless you are looking to license code
(which I think will be a very tough road). What you need (I suspect) is
the file system format. There are a number of folks that have written
tools that access the file system directory through disk i/o. For
example, the folks at http://www.sysinternals.com have an NTFS utility
for MS-DOS and Windows 98. You can also look at sites like
http://www.ntfs.com etc. I think this route might be what you should
explore. What you need is knowledge, not a legal license. No matter
what you do - please keep in mind that Microsoft will continue to evolve
NTFS - and any product you develop that is using disk level formats for
one operating system may not work on the next version.-----Original Message-----
From: Jose M. Rus [mailto:xxxxx@interactivity.es]
Sent: Tuesday, June 17, 2003 5:41 AM
To: File Systems Developers
Subject: [ntfsd] NTFS specificationMy company is developing a crash recovery application, for this we need
direct access to NTFS partitions (before booting Windows). We contacted
Microsoft Spain for information about licensing of the NTFS
specificaction, but they don’t know of any license terms.Who can we apply to for this?
There are only a few companies that have access to the NTFS source code.
There are thousands of programmers and companies that would like to have
the code. Try offering Microsoft a few million dollars and see if they
will give you a source code license. Otherwise, you will have to do it
the hard way and reverse engineer it, which is a very difficult project
to get completely correct. Reading is easier than writing.
----- Original Message -----
From: “Jose M. Rus”
To: “File Systems Developers”
Sent: Tuesday, June 17, 2003 5:40 AM
Subject: [ntfsd] NTFS specification
> My company is developing a crash recovery application, for this we
need
> direct access to NTFS partitions (before booting Windows). We
contacted
> Microsoft Spain for information about licensing of the NTFS
> specificaction, but they don’t know of any license terms.
>
> Who can we apply to for this?
>
>
>
> —
> You are currently subscribed to ntfsd as: xxxxx@yoshimuni.com
> To unsubscribe send a blank email to xxxxx@lists.osr.com
>
One doesn’t need the source code - just official description of the
structures. IMO, this should be available in support incidents, or paid
support.
Can someone from MS confirm whether this information is available to
customers in any way?
“David J. Craig” wrote:
There are only a few companies that have access to the NTFS source code.
There are thousands of programmers and companies that would like to have
the code. Try offering Microsoft a few million dollars and see if they
will give you a source code license. Otherwise, you will have to do it
the hard way and reverse engineer it, which is a very difficult project to
get completely correct. Reading is easier than writing.
–
Kind regards, Dejan M. MVP for DDK
http://www.alfasp.com E-mail: xxxxx@alfasp.com
Alfa Transparent File Encryptor - Transparent file encryption services.
Alfa File Protector - File protection and hiding library for Win32
developers.
Alfa File Monitor - File monitoring library for Win32 developers.
Look here http://sourceforge.net/projects/linux-ntfs/. This is the best NTFS
docs I know. Also look at Linux NTFS sources.
-htfv
----- Original Message -----
From: “Jose M. Rus”
To: “File Systems Developers”
Sent: Tuesday, June 17, 2003 12:40 PM
Subject: [ntfsd] NTFS specification
> My company is developing a crash recovery application, for this we need
> direct access to NTFS partitions (before booting Windows). We contacted
> Microsoft Spain for information about licensing of the NTFS
> specificaction, but they don’t know of any license terms.
>
> Who can we apply to for this?
>
>
>
> —
> You are currently subscribed to ntfsd as: xxxxx@vba.com.by
> To unsubscribe send a blank email to xxxxx@lists.osr.com
>
>