find files occupied sectors on hard disk

Posted 21 Jul '12 - 2:45

Edited 21 Jul '12 - 2:50

Solution 1

I assume you are trying to write a secure delete application?
That is not as easy as you think...

Google is your friend here: Secure delete c++[^] - but be prepared for some work, it is not at all easy. Just think about SSDs - they don't write where they tell you they are, just mark the old blocks as "available for reuse" at a later date.

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Posted 21 Jul '12 - 4:09

OriginalGriff739K

Comments

pasztorpisti - 23 Jul '12 - 18:36

+5 good question what happens on ssd drives. on non-ssd drive maybe it would be enough to open the file, get its size, and write zeros whatever you want into it.

OriginalGriff - 24 Jul '12 - 3:36

Nowhere near! :laugh: If you want to actually do a "proper" secure delete there are a huge number of things you have to take into account, including the magnetic properties of the physical media. For example, did you know that it it always possible to recover the first dataset written to a magnetic media? And that it is normally possible to recover the last 4 or five such datasets? Writing a "0" or "1" affects the magnetic hysteresis of the existing disk surface - it doesn't set it to a specific magnetic "value". It's fascinating stuff, but there are established rules on how to securely scrub data, and it requires a number of passes with specific data patterns!

pasztorpisti - 24 Jul '12 - 3:48

LOL I didn't know that 4-5 writes can be recovered, interesting stuff! :D

Solution 2

As far as I know, it is impossible to write to a specific sector on disk through win32 API. You need to write a driver using low-level kernel API.

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Posted 22 Jul '12 - 1:52

hbprotoss550

Comments

farzinsantoury - 23 Jul '12 - 3:55

thanks, do you have an idea how can I start driver programming? any reference? book?

hbprotoss - 23 Jul '12 - 5:08

Refer to MS WDK: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/gg487428.aspx Development kits and docs are included.

Solution 3

Another resource is the SysInternals utilities. There are some interesting file system utilities with source code there.

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Posted 23 Jul '12 - 11:19

JackDingler8.9K

This content, along with any associated source code and files, is licensed under The Code Project Open License (CPOL)

0	Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov	425
1	OriginalGriff	315
2	Slacker007	240
3	Aarti Meswania	210
4	Maciej Los	200

0	Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov	8,893
1	OriginalGriff	7,134
2	CPallini	3,678
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4	Maciej Los	2,428

find files occupied sectors on hard disk

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