Can NTFS (or any other file system for that matter) assign a file outside of the partition?
No, wouldn't that completely void the purpose of a filesystem to begin with? If you just want to manipulate the raw 0's and 1's stored on the disk outside your partition, there's plenty of low-level disk operation tools you can use. You can also mount another partition within a mounted NTFS partition (i.e. you can mount another partition at C:\MyNewVol\
), if the files are stored within another filesystem.
Those particular files you outlined above are called metafiles, and are well defined per the NTFS specification. See that previous link for a description of various metafiles (e.g. the VBR you mentioned is stored in the $Boot
metafile), and where they are located on-disk with respect to the NTFS partition boundaries.
Also, with respect to the whole MBR vs. VBR, from the Wikipedia page on VBR:
[The VBR] is the first sector of an individual partition on the device, with the first sector of the entire device being a master boot record (MBR) containing the partition table.
Thus, you can access the VBR through the NTFS filesystem (assuming you have the proper permissions to do so), but you can't directly access the MBR; for that, you do need low-level disk tools.