asked on

Low level disk i/o in C++ for editing the metafiles

I currently own two Maxtor hard drives--both of which I've experienced at one time or another a failure or corruption of the master file table (\$MFT). As a result of this I frequently have backed up the drives metafiles using R-Studio NTFS, but have no way to restore the backed up files without typing in each byte from the backed up file. Frustrated by this, I decided to design a C++ program that would both read and write these metafiles, however I do not know how to do low-level disk I/O in C++ under Windows 2000. Can anyone point me in the right direction to how I might do low-level disk reads and writes in a Windows 2000 C++ environment so that I can save and restore my drives metafiles?

Thanks,

Chris

Jaime Olivares

I guess Windows2000 won't allow you to write directly to any sector of your disk. So the unique solution I know is to build a driver to access IDE I/O port, just like in DOS.
Look at this question related to writting directly to system I/O ports.
https://www.experts-exchange.com/questions/21045309/Controll-of-PC-speaker-on-windows-XP-embedde-system.html

Axter

Look at DeviceIoControl API function

Axter

See following links:

http://Q_20666119
http://Q_20009071
http://Q_10081599
http://Q_20389244

Axter

Correction:
http:Q_20666119
http:Q_20009071
http:Q_10081599
http:Q_20389244

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

Axter

membership

This solution is only available to members.

To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.

Start Free Trial

grg99

You can open up any disk device with some funny drive name incantation, see the drive paths that scroll up your screen when you do a "safe mode" boot. Put those in a call to CreateFile() and you shoul dbe good to go.