MMC disk management does not provide "delete partition" for a hard disk

NTDEV
1

Hi,

I have a RDX drive which contains a removable hard disk.
I saw that the mmc disk management does not provide the “delete partition” for this disk (on the popup menu it’s grey).

Does anybody knows what options/flag a disk device need, that mmc will not enable the “delete partition”?

I would like to use this “feature” for my own disk, so after a partition was created I could prevent to get it removed. - Sure I could monitor all the partition related IOCTL and prevent the delete, but disable the menu item would make it transparent.

Thx Norbert

2

I found the answer:

Windows only supports one partition on removable device.
All action related to multiple partitions are disabled.

3

> Windows only supports one partition on removable device.

…unless you make it believe that that this disk is basic. The whole thing involves filtering just a single IOCTL(namely, IOCTL_STORAGE_QUERY_PROPERTY) and modifying RemovableMedia field of a STORAGE_DEVICE_DESCRIPTOR structure…

Anton Bassov

4

That might be a very useful tool to have around. I assume this is an example somewhere? Time for me to go do some research…

— xxxxx@hotmail.com wrote:

From: xxxxx@hotmail.com
To: “Windows System Software Devs Interest List”
Subject: RE:[ntdev] MMC disk management does not provide “delete partition” for a hard disk
Date: Wed, 11 Aug 2010 09:11:20 -0400 (EDT)

> Windows only supports one partition on removable device.

…unless you make it believe that that this disk is basic. The whole thing involves filtering just a single IOCTL(namely, IOCTL_STORAGE_QUERY_PROPERTY) and modifying RemovableMedia field of a STORAGE_DEVICE_DESCRIPTOR structure…

Anton Bassov

—
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5

> Windows only supports one partition on removable device.

It supports only 1 partition on removable disk as a volume, other partitions are still available by reading the correct sector ranges from \.\PhysicalDrive%d

–
Maxim S. Shatskih
Windows DDK MVP
xxxxx@storagecraft.com
http://www.storagecraft.com

6

“Gregory G Dyess” wrote in message news:xxxxx@ntdev…
> That might be a very useful tool to have around. I assume this is an
> example somewhere? Time for me to go do some research…

See this for example
http://portableapps.com/node/7181

- pa

> — xxxxx@hotmail.com wrote:
>
> From: xxxxx@hotmail.com
> To: “Windows System Software Devs Interest List”
> Subject: RE:[ntdev] MMC disk management does not provide “delete
> partition” for a hard disk
> Date: Wed, 11 Aug 2010 09:11:20 -0400 (EDT)
>
>> Windows only supports one partition on removable device.
>
>
> …unless you make it believe that that this disk is basic. The whole
> thing involves filtering just a single IOCTL(namely,
> IOCTL_STORAGE_QUERY_PROPERTY) and modifying RemovableMedia field of a
> STORAGE_DEVICE_DESCRIPTOR structure…
>
>
> Anton Bassov
>
> —
> NTDEV is sponsored by OSR
>
> For our schedule of WDF, WDM, debugging and other seminars visit:
> http://www.osr.com/seminars
>
> To unsubscribe, visit the List Server section of OSR Online at
> http://www.osronline.com/page.cfm?name=ListServer
>
>
>

7

Thx for all your responses.