I am developing an application in which it would be of great advantage to monitor all of the activity on a hard drive. I am using Diskmon to trace the activity and IOMeter to make particular requests to the drive. All is well, except that Diskmon only recognizes actual hard drives and unfortunately I only have one physical drive in the computers that I have available. This drive happens to have one partition for windows. So whenever applications or anything in Windows makes a request to the drive, it appears as extraneous data in the Diskmon log file.
As such, I am curious to know if there is anyway to create a "virtual hard drive" that is for all intents and purposes a normal hard drive with respect to Windows? I have tried creating a virtual hard disk (VHD) as supported by Windows 7. As far as I am concerned, it actually does appear as a hard drive because it shows up in "My Computer" as a new disk. Even IOMeter picks up on the VHD. However, Diskmon does not differentiate between the VHD and the true disk on which it resides. As such, the virtual drive feature (VHD) does nothing to accomplish my goal. My assumption is that the Diskmon application is using lower level Windows APIs in which the difference between regular data on a disk and those within a virtual disk are trivial.
Is it possible for me to create a true virtual disk that even the diskmon logging utility will be able identify as a genuine hard drive? Ideally, I would like to create such a virtual disk on a USB key, but from what I am seeing currently, the only option may be to buy an external hard drive.
Any help is greatly appreciated! Thanks
