NTFS: large clusters

A small addition to this post.

Starting from Windows 10 “Redstone 3” (Fall Creators Update), it’s possible to create an NTFS volume using one of the following cluster sizes: 128K, 256K, 512K, 1M, 2M. Previously, the largest supported cluster size was 64K.

Currently, I’m not aware of any third-party tools that support such large clusters: there is no support in the NTFS-3G driver, no support in the Linux kernel (#1, #2), no support in The Sleuth Kit, no support in RawCopy, no support in several proprietary forensic tools.

This update also changed the way how the “sectors per cluster” field (located in an NTFS boot sector) is treated. Previously, this was an unsigned byte and its value was treated literally. Now, this is a signed byte and its value is used as shown in the following pseudocode:

// Argument:
// - SectorsPerCluster: a signed byte (from the offset 13 in an NTFS boot sector).
// Return value:
// - A true number of sectors per cluster.
NtfsGetTrueSectorsPerCluster(SectorsPerCluster)
{
	if ((unsigned)SectorsPerCluster > 0x80)
		return 1 << -SectorsPerCluster
	else
		return (unsigned)SectorsPerCluster
}

This isn’t the same as the algorithm used when dealing with the “file record segment size” and “index record size” fields in an NTFS boot sector, note the edge case when the byte is equal to 0x80 (this corresponds to a negative value, but it’s still used as unsigned for backward compatibility, because 0x80 is used for 64K clusters).

A sample file system image can be found here.