If you are interested in accessing NTFS drives from Windows 95 or Windows 98, then you should use NTFS for Windows 98 rather than NTFSDOS. Full read/write access to NTFS drives from DOS is available with NTFSDOS Professional Edition, part of Winternals Administrator's Pak. If you want to salvage files off a corrupt NTFS volume or repair an NTFS boot sector or partition table, see Disk Commander, also available in Winternals Administrator's Pak

NTFSDOS.EXE is a read-only network file system driver for DOS/Windows which can recognize and mount NTFS drives for transparent access. It makes NTFS drives appear indistinguishable from standard FAT drives, providing the ability to navigate, view and execute programs on them from DOS or from Windows, including from the Windows 3.1 File Manager and Windows 95 Explorer.

To use NTFSDOS, simply execute it from the DOS command line (DOS 5.0 or greater is required), or from your AUTOEXEC.BAT. Executing NTFSDOS before Windows is started will create NTFS drives that are visible globally once inside Windows. Executing NTFSDOS in a DOS box means that the NTFS drives only exist within the DOS box where NTFSDOS was executed.

When NTFSDOS starts, it will scan all hard-disk partitions on your system to look for NTFS drives. It will mount all NTFS drives it finds as unique DOS logical drive letters, and will inform you as it does so.

If you run NTFSDOS under DOS 7.0, NTFS drives will support long filename calls even before Windows starts. To propagate this support into Windows 95, NTFSDOS automatically has Windows run the NTFSHLP.VXD VxD device driver. No changes to SYSTEM.INI or the registry are necessary for this to occur - NTFSDOS will detect when Windows 95 starts and load the driver without user-intervention. You need NTFSHLP.VXD only if you will be running NTFSDOS with Windows 95.

NTFSDOS implements its own caching, and uses one of two types of memory, depending on how your system is configured. Its first choice is to use XMS memory for caching, as this minimizes demands placed on conventional memory. If you start NTFSDOS before Windows, then HIMEM.SYS, which can be found in the WINDOWS directory under Windows 95 or the DOS directory under Windows 3.1, or its equivalent, must be started before NTFSDOS. If NTFSDOS does not detect an XMS server, it will resort to allocating 64KB of conventional memory for its cache. In either case, it will inform you of its action.

NTFSDOS takes six command line parameters:

The /L parameter lets you specify which drive letters NTFSDOS should attempt to use as it mounts NTFS drives.
The /C option lets you override the default XMS cache size.
The /V option directs NTFSDOS to print some messages detailing the drives it looks at and the memory it allocates.
The /X switch forces NTFSDOS to use standard BIOS Int 13 services. Use this if NTFSDOS has problems with your computer's extended Int 13 services.
The /U option has NTFSDOS correctly sort through files with unicode names. You should only use this if a NTFSDOS directory listing enters an infinite loop within directories that contain files with unicode names.
Finally, the /N switch can be used to disable NTFSDOS support for compression. Much of the conventional memory that NTFSDOS normally uses is for compression buffers, so if you will be accessing drives or files that are not compressed and would like to optimize NTFSDOS use of memory, use this switch.
The syntax for these parameters is:

/L:
Specifies drive letter to start mounting at
/C:
Specifies size of XMS cache in KB
/V
Verbose
/X
Disable extended int 13 support
/U
Tolerate unicode file names
/N
Disable support for compression