Hello:

I've been trying for the last few days to access a hard disk in windows and be able to read in raw format (a la dd).

I've tried many ways and somewhat been successful but not good enough. I tried forking dd and then read its output, but on large disks the buffer just grows too much and the program dies. I need to be able to control the buffer, so I guees I must open the file in perl without using an external program.

I have been trying using the Win32API, but without success. The following code works on a normal file, but not when i try to open a partition or a physical disk. The Function OsFHandleOpen just dies saying wrong parameter. Any ideas on how can i fix this, or some other way to read the raw disk in perl?



use Win32API::File 0.08 qw( :ALL );

$winHandle= createFile( "//./c:", "r") or die "$^E\n";
OsFHandleOpen( FILE, $winHandle, "r" ) or die " $^E\n";

while(<FILE>){
print "$_\n";
}

In reply to Reading a physical disk in windows as a File by Anonymous Monk

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