You will need to open the HDD (or better yet, just the partition) with direct access, then write your own file system library. You were pretty much doing this. Just use
"\\\\.\\C:"
The good news is that this is not as hard as it sounds.
I would
STRONGLY reccommend getting a hex editor. I use the excellent
Breakpoint Hex Workshop[
^] but it is not free. Try searching around for 1 that can open HDDs.
I would recommend that you get a basic understanding of the FAT filesystem first. Although the idea of NTFS is remarkably different the implementation of core features is almost identical for accessing the $FILEs such as $MFT.
There is a website
http://www.ntfs.com/[
^] which I used for helping my understanding of the NTFS filesystem, although I already knew the FAT filesystem.
In addition. You can read parts of the NTFS Parser Lib that you mentioned, there is no harm in that, you just can't copy code from it.