<p>Is there a way to access file system info via some type of Windows API? If not what other methods are available to a user mode developer?</p>

Not very clean, but you can use
```
DeviceIoControl()
```
Open volume as a file, pass resulting handle to
```
DeviceIoControl()
```
together with control code. Check MSDN for control codes, there is something like "read journal record".