Low-Level hard drive access

Last time I hijack this thread, I promise.

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Originally Posted by @nthony

In other words, macs are not as notorious for their capacity as applications development platforms as Unix/Windows.

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Then you obviously don't talk to Unix professionals. Macs run on a BSD kernel, and contain all the Unix-y goodness that Linux does. Unix shells, vi, emacs, grep... Even an optional X11 shell for compiling and running X-Windows apps. More and more Unix pros are looking to Macs because they provide all the power Unix does with more application support from commercial developers.

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Have you seen their commercials lately? It actually looks like they've come to embrace their role in the computing industry as "noob-friendly" caterers for simpletons and their target audience of "neo-political, death-to-the-man, new-age, graphical-media-information-exchange-technologist, long-haired-hippy" types.

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Have you seen a commercial for a Windows machine lately? All they talk about is "Oooh, I can do digital photos and home movies and Vista has WOW!" Commercials are targeted at the lowest demographic. That's what they're for. I've never seen an add that targeted developers outside of a programming magazine or trade journal.

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After all, its only what you would expect from a company that develops computers with one-button mice while the rest of the world is progressing onto motion-detecting thermal-surfaces.

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Apple has been shipping a multi-button mouse for at least a year, and Macs have supported multi-button mice since the mid 90s. As for your "motion detecting thermal surfaces," I'd be willing to wages that you will find that in very niche applications and not in general home devices.

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Then again, their one-button mouse fits perfectly into their one -response "ok" dialogs for prompts that clearly require at *least* a "yes/no" option. But they've targetted their demographic well, knowing that their users probably aren't mentally equipped enough to handle anything more than one choice at a time.

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Ah yes, this again. Had it ever occurred to you that the OS was designed for a one-button mouse, and that everything is easily done with one? Just as Unix desktops were designed with three button mice in mind and the NES was designed with two button controllers in mind. As for your dialog boxes, and been using Macs for years and I can't ever recall seeing such a thing. In fact, the buttons on Mac dialog boxes typically reflect what's actually happening, rather than just yes/no/cancel. For example, if I try to move a file to location that already has a file of that name, the buttons on the warning box read "Stop"/"Replace", which is quite a bit more informative than yes/no.

On the development front, Apple offers a free professional quality dev suite which is in my opinion far superior to Visual Studio (I have to use VS 2005 at work and I can't stand it). Apple uses a custom port of GCC as its compiler and most of their extensions are contributed back into the main GCC tree (Objective-C++, for example). Xcode supports a huge number of languages, and it's easy to extend for more.

Compare this to MS, who offers a crippled dev studio for free, and charges hundreds of dollars for the real deal. Now which platform is developer friendly?

Mac bashing is fine if the points are valid, but dismissing someone's platform as irrelevant based on ignorance is infuriating.

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There I'm done.

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Originally Posted by JVene

There are two basic approaches to research, that which the OS may provide and an even lower level hardware access gained by writing directly to the drive's controllers.

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Yeah, I'd be more looking to go down the OS road for reasons like those mentioned by Salem. So if people could just give me names of functions/libraries/anything to look up, it would be appreciated. I understand in unix if I treat the /dev/whatever device as a file I might be able to do what I'm hoping for? What's with that? And there's gotta be something in the windows API that gives me what I want, I'm just clueless as to where to start. Thanks.

Yes, in Linux/Unix, you could use the "/dev/hd" approach.

In win32, try CreateFile scroll down to the "Physical Disks and Volumes".

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Originally Posted by abachler

No the answer is the same regardless of the OS, and the answer is that it depoends on your BIOS, but for PC's you use INT 21

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You have no idea what you're talking about. First of all, interrupt 21 is part of DOS, not the BIOS. Second, who would use an old, busted, 16-bit anachronism to access a modern hard drive?

All operating system provide the capability to interact with devices at a low level. The specifics are obviously... specific.

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Mac's are for noobs and hippie graphics artist types

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Wow. I had no idea I was a "noob." Or a hippie. If bashing Mac users is something that's acceptable on this site I think I'll go somewhere else.

Ack, not back to the Mac-bashing counter-bashing/whatever you want to call it!

Ok, so I looked at the CreateFile option and that looks like it could prove helpful. It says that physical drives can only be accessed by CreateFile in XP onwards. What would be done for the DOS-based versions of Windows? Is that when the interrupt 21 would be used?

Also, for the /dev/hd ... Is it as simple and straightforward as it sounds? The first byte of the 'file' is the first byte of the boot sector, the last byte is the last actual byte on the disk?

Anyone bashing Mac's these days, is SERIOUSLY uninformed. They've made a complete 180 degree change.

Not only is their latest OS based on BSD (which is an excellent OS), but the Mac's also have some of the hottest mobo's with their Quad 3.0Ghz (and up), set up's.

Just a blazing fast system!

It's true that the Mac's will probably never have the cheapest prices, but they always have a far greater integration of their product, especially in media, and superior standard case and monitor designs. Really easy on the ol' eyes.

> What would be done for the DOS-based versions of Windows?
Prayer perhaps - I dunno.

> Also, for the /dev/hd ... Is it as simple and straightforward as it sounds?
It might be. Get a sacrificial system set up and start experimenting.

That is, one which is easy to re-install, and which you don't mind losing any of the contents. Because you will trash your system beyond repair if you make even the smallest mistake when playing with things like boot sectors and partition tables.