Skip to main content

Recognizing unknown partitions in Windoze

This is the starting point if you are planning to develop an Installable File System Driver (IFSD) for Windoze. You can also use this if you want to format partitions that aren’t visible inside your Windoze box.


First thing’s first, fire up a registry editor. Use regedit or any third party editors. Search for the entry:



HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\DOS Devices

If you’re in the right place then, add a new string value. The name should be the drive letter you wish to associate and should be a drive letter that currently isn’t used by your box. The name along with its value should be of the form:



K:
\Device\Harddisk0\Partition1

In Windoze, hard drive numbers start at 0 and partition numbers start at 1. The above example is equivalent to /dev/hda1. You can also verify your partition table without any third party applications such as Partition Magic, GParted, etc. by running diskmgmt.msc on the command line. The drive K: can be replaced with any free drive letter.


Done! No, not yet. Forgetting the Windoze protocol? Restart your machine for it to take effect.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Architecture Complexity

Here are the items to consider: Coding to an interface Service Oriented Architecture Automated Testing Domain Driven Design Custom Data Access Layer Layered architecture Complexity is relatively equal the number of lines of code. Note that complexity is not bad. It must be justified.

Moving on

So I bought my self a 2.5″ hard drive enclosure for about 750 bucks. I wish I have my own tools for constructing a device as such. Instead of going for a 2GB USB flash drive, I chose to salvage the 30GB hard drive of an incapacitated laptop. Cool isn’t it? Though relatively slower than a typical USB flash drive, the storage capacity outweighs it. [To God] Thanks for being there always.

Bin to hex converter in 16-bit DOS assembly

Just a quick code like putting your keyboard where your brain is. There should be another way of doing this. I hate this code. start: xor al, al xor bl, bl xor cl, cl mov dl, 4 ; use dl as counter input: mov ah, 00 int 16h cmp ah, 1ch je exit cmp al, '0' jb input cmp al, '1' ja input convert: mov cl, dl dec cl ; dl - 1 sub al, 30h ; get original value shl al, cl ; place in the appropriate bit position or bl, al ; save in bl dec dl ; prepare for the next bit jnz input ; must be 4 bits cmp bl, 9 ja letter jbe number letter: add bl, 37h ; because 'A' - 37h is 0Ah jmp here number: add bl, 30h ; because '0' - 30h is 00h here: call display jmp start display: mov ah, 02h ...