Location of MFT file?

Question

I have a partition, formatted as NTFS. I have studied that devices formatted as NTFS have a MFT (Master File Table) which contains a lot of information about the contents of a devices.

Is MFT really a file?
Where is it located?
How can I view it?

I, actually want to view the $BITMAP to know the locations of all the files and directories in a partition.

Update: Seems like I can only view the MFT file using HexEditor. Still searching for more options though...

Solution

Accessing a disk's cluster BITMAP can be read via the FSCTL_GET_VOLUME_BITMAP API call. However, it won't tell what files are at each cluster. You need either parse the MFT (faster) or recursively call FSCTL_GET_RETRIEVAL_POINTERS on each file (slow).