How to direct access physical drive on Vista

[stoneyrh]

Hi, all, I got that CreateFile with a file name \\.\PhysicalDriveX can open a handle for direct accessing to appropriate disk, but as it is said in MSDN, it doesn't work for Vista. When I try to do it on Vista, it always returns 'Access deny'. So could anybody knows there is someway to do the job on Vista?
Thank you in advance.

[stoneyrh]

Still waiting for response, could anybody give me a hand?
Thanks

[hoxsiew]

Never touched Vista; but for me, under Win7, it requires that the app run as administrator.

[Ajay Vijay]

Never touched Vista; but for me, under Win7, it requires that the app run as administrator.

Yes, on Windows Vista and higher, your process needs to be running as Administrator (Elevated user). With elevation your process gains higher integrity, and thus can perform administrative tasks.

[stoneyrh]

I am also running as administrator too, but I can only read from a dist, when writing to another disk, it also returns 'Access is denied'. I found that it requires a flag named SL_FORCE_DIRECT_WRITE to the write request, but in that case, it requires something running in Ring0, it will make the stuff more complicated.

[Ajay Vijay]

Well, first thing first - don't attempt to do it on hard disk/drive which is important for you. It will make everything unreadable.

CPU have 4 rings, ring 0 through ring 3. The Kernel runs on ring 0, the user applications run on ring 3. As of now (at least in Windows), the other two rings are not used.

Only Kernel mode programs (i.e. Device Drivers), are allowed to execute something at level 0, not user programs.

Long way to go. But just understand that the applications are User-Mode programs, which cannot execute Kernel mode instructions.

Read about Device Drivers/Kernel-mode to understand more (if you can!!)

[Chris_F]

I should hope your program can't write directly to a drive so easily! Reading isn't that big of a deal, but bypassing the filesystem and writing data would be highly destructive! Why on earth do you need to do this?

This is the type of thing that will require a driver to accomplish and should be done carefully, otherwise you'll nuke your operating system.

CPU have 4 rings, ring 0 through ring 3.

Most operating systems only make use of 0 and 3 because x86 is one of the few architectures that has more than 2 ring levels. It's done for comparability.