This sure looks like an assignment from the UCD MSc program
Thanks for the info @JaredDM. I'm able to open the file in hex. The challenge that i'm actually having is the USB image (ntfs5.dd) was on NTFS previously and then it got formatted to FAT. I need to locate the MFT and its timestamp, files, and its attribute. I'm new to NTFS analysis, do you have any other suggestion or workaround?
Fascinating.
If the format of the device *was* NTFS, but was reformatted to FAT, I'd recommend going back to @JaredDM's solution.
You're not doing NTFS analysis at this point, you're trying to NTFS recovery. So…why not just locate all instances of "FILE0", grab 1024 bytes from (and including) the "F", and the proceed on. Dump all of these to a file, and you'll have what could be an MFT, or a partial one.
*Then* you can do some modicum of NTFS analysis, albeit without the actual file system.