Question

How to read/write the sectors of physical drive on Linux

Asked by: jl66

In MS window, there are API functions to directly read/write the sectors of physical drive, On Linux, are there similar functions to do these?  Can anyone point out a link or which *.c program contain this kind of info? My platform is Fedora 11,but it does not matter.
     

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Asked On
2009-09-04 at 20:04:50ID24709350
Tags

Fedora 11

,

Linux Development

Topics

Linux Programming

,

Fedora Linux

Participating Experts
2
Points
500
Comments
3

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Answers

 

by: darrickhartmanPosted on 2009-09-05 at 11:20:04ID: 25267201

You might look at 'dd'  it allows you to do block by block transfers specifying various options.

http://linux.die.net/man/1/dd

 

by: duncan_roePosted on 2009-09-05 at 20:05:34ID: 25268625

Under Linux, you simply use read (2) and write (2) to the block device (/dev/hda, /dev/hda1, etc.). It is up to you the programmer to ensure that reads and writes start and stop on a block boundary (use fdisk to determine the block size, or find the code in fdisk that does that and incorporate it in your program). That is all dd does (and you have to tell it the block size).

The Slackware distribution used to come with a utility called rawrite.exe which was a dd replacement for Windows, for writing boot floppies. It's written in Pascal. You can get it off an old Slackware ISO, e.g. ftp://ftp.encntc.edu.tw/Linux/ISO/Slackware/slackware-9.1-source-d4.iso. Mount the iso in loopback mode (no need to burn it) as shown (your pathnames may vary). I hope that is some help...

# mount -oro,loop /usr/iso/slackware-9.1-source-d4.iso /mnt/iso
$ cd /tmp
$ mkdir rawrite
$ cd rawrite
$ unzip /mnt/iso/source/rootdisks/rawritewin/rawwritewin-0.6.src.zip

                                              
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by: jl66Posted on 2009-09-07 at 07:31:18ID: 25275308

Thank both of you so much for the info. Can you know any links or code to do the same in C/C++?

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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