Programmatically accessing the Windows file allocation table

Question

How can I programmatically access the file allocation entries (FAT) in Windows? I have read the articles which mention reading entries at a particular address in the harddisk, but how can I read those entries from the harddisk. I can try in C, C++, C# or VB.

The tutorials on http://www.ntfs.com were helpful in understanding what to read on the FAT, but didn't clarify how to do so programmatically.

Nick Meyer · Accepted Answer · 2009-07-15T13:10:48.907

2

You can open the hard drive itself with the file I/O functions like CreateFile and ReadFile. You can open the disk using CreateFile, seek to the appropriate sector using SetFilePointer, and then read using ReadFile.

See this KB article for more details about reading data directly from the disk.

edited Jul 15 '09 at 13:10

answered Jul 15 '09 at 13:04

Nick Meyer

39,212
14
67
75

so how can i make use of the readfile function to read the FAT entry data? – Anirudh Goel Jul 15 '09 at 13:07

Programmatically accessing the Windows file allocation table

1 Answers1