Direct access to hard disk with no FS from C program on Linux

by

As mentioned elsewhere, under *NIX systems, block devices like /dev/sda can be accessed as plain files. Note that if file system is mounted from the device, opening it as file for writing would fail.

If you want to play with block devices, I would advise to first use the loop device, which presents a plain file as a block device. For example:

dd if=/dev/zero of=./loop_file_10MB bs=1024 count=10K
losetup /dev/loop0 $PWD/loop_file_10MB

After that, /dev/loop0 would behave as if it was a block device, but all information written would be stored in the file.

More Related Contents:

  1. How to make child process die after parent exits?
  2. What is time_t ultimately a typedef to?
  3. How to calculate the CPU usage of a process by PID in Linux from C?
  4. What is the equivalent to Posix popen() in the Win32 API?
  5. How to recursively list directories in C on Linux?
  6. Why does this program print “forked!” 4 times?
  7. How does kernel get an executable binary file running under linux?
  8. How do I execute an external program within C code in Linux with arguments?
  9. Measure time in Linux – time vs clock vs getrusage vs clock_gettime vs gettimeofday vs timespec_get?
  10. Is malloc/free a syscall or a library routine provided by libc?
  11. Creating a new directory in C
  12. How to list physical disks?
  13. POSIX API call to list all the pthreads running in a process
  14. Building a kernel module from several source files which one of them has the same name as the module
  15. Turn a simple socket into an SSL socket
  16. After forking, are global variables shared?
  17. How to check if a given file descriptor stored in a variable is still valid?
  18. how to call function in executable from my library?
  19. Interprocess mutex with pthreads
  20. Problems with SO_BINDTODEVICE Linux socket option
  21. Is there a tool to know whether a value has an exact binary representation as a floating point variable?
  22. plain C: opening a directory with fopen()
  23. Reading and writing to serial port in C on Linux
  24. Why my kernel log is not showing the latest output?
  25. How do I pass a command line argument while starting up GDB in Linux? [duplicate]
  26. How to modify memory contents using GDB?
  27. Sharing memory between processes through the use of mmap()
  28. How to set the IP address from C in linux
  29. Size of pid_t, uid_t, gid_t on Linux
  30. How do I lock files using fopen()?

Leave a Comment