Talking directly to Hard Drives

[lhauser63]

Hi,

I've been writing an application that talks directly to the hard drives. I had been using the IOCTL_IDE_PASS_THROUGH with the DeviceIOControl. That works fine if the drive is attached to the IDE bus. But drives can be attached via many other methods. Is there a way to pass an ATA command to a drive regardless of the driver? Or is there a way to determine in all cases if the drive is IDE or SCSI and then pass a command to it even if it's connected to USB or Firewire? I want to support all versions of Windows.

thanks

[fandrieu]

Hi there,

I would be interested in seeing how you successfully send ata commands to an IDE drive, and how you get results.
I'm trying to do that in user mode !

Thanks in advance!

Regs

[lhauser63]

Hi,

We ended up doing a filter driver to add the new calls we needed. The Microsoft pass through call had a bug in it (surprise, surprise). Then I wrote an application to talk to the driver.

You can contact me at laura@mobilexperts.com for more information.