File-System Tool - 14 Sep 2004

Winternals Software is on a roll in the Utilities category, for the second time taking a Readers' Choice award for the third year in a row. This time, Winternals' NTFSDOS Professional takes the award for Best File-System Tool with 41 percent of the vote.

NTFSDOS Professional lets you access NTFS volumes on unbootable Windows 2003/XP/2000/NT systems. The software creates a boot disk that contains an MS-DOS environment, from which you can mount NTFS drives that have drive letters. You can then run DOS programs to read, write, repair, or make modifications to the drives. NTFSDOS Professional works with many third-party antivirus tools: When you boot an infected system with the NTFSDOS disk, the system will bypass the typical Windows installation to allow offline cleaning. The software lets you run the Windows NTFSCHK Check Disk program within the MS-DOS environment to verify and repair an accidentally corrupted NTFS disk structure.