programatically accessing the file allcoation table in windows

Question

hi i want to know how can i programatically access the file allocation entries (FAT) in my windows operating system. I have read the articles which mention to read 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 www.ntfs.com were helpful in understanding what to read on the FAT but it didn't clarify how can i do so programatically.

Answer 1

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.