Active @ Disk Editor
Escolastico Hall
I would like to have a powerful Linux-based disk viewer / editor (raw hex editor) like Acronis Disk Editor. It should show the absolute sector, cylinder, head and relative sector for the part you are looking at, and you can search and go to positions, etc.
I would recommend Active@ Disk Editor as it is freeware Windows and Linux and in my opinion a better all around tool then Acronis due to many useful features. It meets most of your requirements along with some very useful features without being cluttered. Very similar to Acronis Disk Editor it is a powerful hard drive raw hex editor which shows your current sector and offset as well as having the ability to goto any location on the disk and find locations by searching for ANSI, Hex, or Unicode strings.
Active@ Disk Editor is a utility created to help you in editing a disk's raw sector data. The editor displays information in binary and text modes at the same time. You can use this view to analyze the contents of data storage structure elements such as hard disks and partitions.
The Data Inspector displays whatever is currently under the cursor. It does so in ten different formats. This can help you interpret data as displayed in Hexadecimal View. If you choose to view the Data Inspector, the window always appears docked to the left panel when you are using Active@ Disk Editor.
A destructive virus can damage the MBR (Master Boot Record) and make it impossible to start the computer from the hard disk. When you start the computer, the code in the MBR executes before the operating system is started. If the MBR is corrupted, the operating system cannot start. The location of the MBR is always track (cylinder) 0, side (head) 0, and sector 1. You may use Active@ Disk Editor to repair a damaged MBR.
When you start Active@ Disk Editor, the default view shows the Info Pane on the right and the editing pane on the left, with a Status Pane across the bottom. You can change the default configuration of the workspace so that it opens each time with your custom settings.
A disk editor is a computer program that allows its user to read, edit, and write raw data (at character or hexadecimal, byte-levels) on disk drives (e.g., hard disks, USB flash disks or removable media such as a floppy disks); as such, they are sometimes called sector editors, since the read/write routines built into the electronics of most disk drives require to read/write data in chunks of sectors (usually 512 bytes). Many disk editors can also be used to edit the contents of a running computer's memory or a disk image.
Unlike hex editors, which are used to edit files, a disk editor allows access to the underlying disk structures, such as the master boot record (MBR) or GUID Partition Table (GPT), file system, and directories. On some operating systems (like Unix or Unix-like) most hex editors can act as disk editors just opening block devices instead of regular files. Programmers can use disk editors to understand these structures and test whether their implementation (e.g. of a file system) works correctly. Sometimes these structures are edited in order to provide examples for teaching data recovery and forensics, or in an attempt to hide data to achieve privacy or hide data from casual examiners. However, modifying such data structures gives only a weak level of protection and data encryption is the preferred method to achieve privacy.
Some disk editors include special functions which enable more comfortable ways to edit and fix file systems or other disk specific data structures. Furthermore, some include simple file browsers that can present the disk contents for partially corrupted file systems or file systems unknown to the operating system. These features can be used for example for file recovery.
Disk editors for home computers of the 1980s were often included as part of utility software packages on floppies or cartridges. The latter had the advantage of being instantly available at power-on and after resets, instead of having to be loaded or reloaded on the same disk drive that later would hold the floppy to be edited (the majority of home computer users possessed only one floppy disk drive at that time). Having the disk editor on cartridge also helped the user avoid editing/damaging the disk editor application disk by mistake.
All 1980s disk editors strove to be better than DEBUG contained in DOS. DEBUG could load, edit, and write one or more sectors from a floppy or hard disk based on the BIOS. This permitted simple disk editing tasks such as saving and restoring the master boot record and other critical sectors, or even changing the active (= boot) partition in the MBR.
In an NTVDM under 1993's Windows NT DEBUG could not access the physical drive with the MBR of the operating system and so was in essence useless as disk editor for the system drive. The Resource Kit and the support tools for some Windows NT versions contained DSKPROBE[1] as a very simple disk editor supporting the use and modification of the partition table in the MBR and related tasks.
A partition editor (also called partitioning utility) is a kind of utility software designed to view, create, modify or delete disk partitions. A disk partition is a logical segment of the storage space on a storage device. By partitioning a large device into several partitions, it is possible to isolate various types of data from one another, and allow the coexistence of two or more operating systems simultaneously. Features and capabilities of partition editors vary, but generally they can create several partition on a disk, or one contiguous partition on several disks, at the discretion of the user. They can also, shrink a partition to allow more partitions created on a storage device, or delete one and expand an adjacent partition into the available space.
I started by writing code to read sectors. I verified that I was reading everything correctly by using a free disk editor program, Active@Disk Editor: -editor.org/index.html It also has some template settings that helped me parse information and show me were the information I needed was located.
The first 12 bytes of each entry contains the file name; this is stored as 8 characters for the name, then 3 characters for the extension. To look for a specific file we match the filename string to locate its entry.
Active@ Disk Editor is a freeware hex editor and low-level disk viewer from the LSoft Technologies to edit physical disks or partitions. You could use it to view and edit disk sectors in binary and text modes. Then you could use it to analyze the contents of data storage structure elements such as: Hard disk drives, SSD & USB Disks, Partitions & Volumes, Files and other objects.
Active@ Disk Editor could use templates to parse and show different structures. It supports the following templates: Master Boot Record, NTFS Boot Sector, FAT Boot Sector, FAT32 Boot Sector, exFAT Boot Sector, HFS+ Volume Header, Ext2/Ext3 Superblock, NTFS MFT Tile Record, FAT Directory Entry, exFAT Directory Entry, LDM Private Header, LDM TOC Block, LDM VMDB Block, LDM Klog Block, LMD VBLK Block, etc.
The way geeks and Sys Admins used to determine if a disk was GPT partitioned was to use the List Disk command of the "DISKPART" tool in a Command Prompt... Today they use the same tool, but normally under Windows PowerShell. Simply enter the commands shown in GREEN below. If any attached disk has been GPT partitioned, an asterisk (*) will appear under the "Gpt" column; as shown in YELLOW for Disk 0 below (or in using the BLUE screen of PowerShell):
Of course, using a disk editor, such as the free HxD or the free demo version of WinHex (or, the more recent, Active@ Disk Editor; TestDisk also understands GPT drives) is the best way to examine the actual contents of your disk drive(s) and see all the details presented below. The Active@ Disk Editor has the best presentation of the data found in these sectors, but we have not found its disk editing tools as easy to use as those in HxD; we use either the 'templates' in WinHex or the Active@DiskEditor to find the precise location of what we wish to copy and then use HxD to do so.
After the above, the UEFI Specification has "(SizeOfPartitionEntry - 128)" for any entries that may exceed 128 bytes: "The rest of the GPT Partition Entry, if any, is reserved by UEFI and must be zero [bytes]." But: As in our example above, and for all the entries we've encountered, they have always been only 128 bytes long. Have you seen a disk drive with entries larger than 128 bytes?
6[Return to Text] The format of VHD files created by Microsoft utilities is specified on their website here. Their VHD files always include at least one more sector beyond the actual contents of a disk drive which has the name "connectix" in it; heres the beginning of the last sector of our 128 MB sample file:
In this study, the effects of varying crystal orientation and composition on active deformation modes are explored for two different Ni-base disk alloys. Understanding these effects will allow for improved predictive modeling and consequently faster advancements in Ni-base alloy development. In order to investigate these effects, compression creep tests were conducted on [001] and [110] oriented single crystal specimens of the disk alloys ME3 and ME501, at different stress/temperature regimes. At 760 C and below, a prominent creep anisotropy exists between the two orientations, with the [110] oriented samples exhibiting superior creep strength. At 815 C, the creep anisotropy disappeared between the two orientations. Through bright field scanning transmission electron microscopy, it was determined that the existence of creep anisotropy is a result of differences in deformation modes between the different orientations and alloy compositions. Results of phase field modeling in which the interaction of dislocations with realistic precipitate structures is also conducted to further advance predictive creep deformation models.
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