Integrating a non PC style partitions with Disk Administrator...

NTDEV
1

Hi All,

I am inquiring if there are any gotcha’s when integrating a disk filter
driver with the Disk Administrator?

So the environment I have is a file system driver that uses a
partitioning/volume architecture that Windows platforms and PC BIOS’s
don’t recognize. So when an Administrator starts the Disk Administrator,
they are asked to write NT signatures to the disks which is fatal to the
volumes/filesystems that are already there.

So I am planning to code a filter driver (via DiskPerf) to intercept the
DISK_IOCTL’s and STORAGE_IOCTL’s to prevent NT/W2K from actually writing
the signatures to disk. But it would be nice to actually have the Disk
Admin recognize the volumes and not write to them. Not so fussed about
recognizing the file systems, that is something for the future.

Regards,

Ian

2

If you plan to support the partitioning scheme through your
own utilities, why dont you initialise the MBR (or the sectors
where the MBR is supposed to be found) with some valid data so
that Disk Administrator will recognise the disk, and not ask for
writing a signature. You can initialise the partition entries with
a type which is not supported by windows. That will cause disk admin
to show the disk as unknown.

Taher

-----Original Message-----
From: xxxxx@lists.osr.com
[mailto:xxxxx@lists.osr.com]On Behalf Of xxxxx@adacel.com.au
Sent: Monday, July 15, 2002 10:35 AM
To: NT Developers Interest List
Subject: [ntdev] Integrating a non PC style partitions with Disk
Administrator…

Hi All,

I am inquiring if there are any gotcha’s when integrating a disk filter
driver with the Disk Administrator?

So the environment I have is a file system driver that uses a
partitioning/volume architecture that Windows platforms and PC BIOS’s
don’t recognize. So when an Administrator starts the Disk Administrator,
they are asked to write NT signatures to the disks which is fatal to the
volumes/filesystems that are already there.

So I am planning to code a filter driver (via DiskPerf) to intercept the
DISK_IOCTL’s and STORAGE_IOCTL’s to prevent NT/W2K from actually writing
the signatures to disk. But it would be nice to actually have the Disk
Admin recognize the volumes and not write to them. Not so fussed about
recognizing the file systems, that is something for the future.

Regards,

Ian

You are currently subscribed to ntdev as: xxxxx@veritas.com
To unsubscribe send a blank email to %%email.unsub%%

3

Unfortunately these disks do not use the PC method of partioning, hence
they do not have MBR’s and they will never be used to boot an OS from.

So what I envisage I have to do is support the appropriate ioctls and
translate the partioning mechanism that are present to the NT way of
things. Also deny any other access to the disks, except for my file
system.

Regards,

Ian