Uncategorized – Page 4

Dump Extents

Mar 152014

This is a simple GUI to FSCTL_GET_RETRIEVAL_POINTERS Microsoft API.

The idea is to read all clusters belonging to a file, then map these clusters on the logical drive where this file is located, and from there re assemble all clusters and save them to a new destination file.

Thanks to this method, one can save/copy a file which is in use since we « raw » read clusters from a logical drive.

This has been tested with success on \boot\bcd and \windows\system32\config\sam, files which you cannot copy in a « normal » mode.

Beware that using this method, you could end up with a corrupted dump since the file could be modified while you are reading it.

Get it on github here.

Disk2vhd

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Fév 092014

Another worthy tool to add to your toolset.

Disk2vhd is a utility that creates VHD (Virtual Hard Disk – Microsoft’s Virtual Machine disk format) versions of physical disks for use in Microsoft Virtual PC or Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines (VMs). The difference between Disk2vhd and other physical-to-virtual tools is that you can run Disk2vhd on a system that’s online. Disk2vhd uses Windows’ Volume Snapshot capability, introduced in Windows XP, to create consistent point-in-time snapshots of the volumes you want to include in a conversion.

See here.

Delphi XE5 upgrade tryout

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Jan 232014

Plan is to rewrite all my delphi 7 apps with Delphi XE5.

First to benefit from a more modern IDE, and to stay in synch with libs I used (jvcl, jwa, etc) but also to be able to build 64bits binaries (following this guide).
Additionally, building android apps would be a nice plus with this new version.

-Installed a brand new Windows7 x64
-Downloaded and installed the eval version.
-Installed JCL and JVCL (thru github, see here)
-Installed JWA
-Installed Madshi

Now the fun starts, CloneDisk delphi projects opens fine in Delphi XE5 (yes!), compiles fine (yes again!) but code needs to be reviewed to work properly.
Side note : x86 binary is much bigger than before. Something to check later.

Let start with the following :
-pchar now means pwidechar (we are now unicode) whereas it meant pansichar in delphi 7, so all ansicode api need to use keyword pansichar.
-replace ansi api by generic ones where possible: i.e messageboxa->messagebox so that it works both in delphi 7/ansi & delphi xe5/unicode

Still a long way to build a x64 binary.

To be continued…

/Erwan

Announcing open source virtual SCSI miniport driver & ImgMount

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Oct 132013

Olof Lagerkvist, the well known author of the popular ImDisk has released an open source virtual SCSI driver.

With that driver, you can mount a virtual disk which will be seen as physical disk by windows.
This vritual disk will appear as a disk in your devices but also in your disk management console.
Read more here.

Being quite enthusiast about this driver, I have decided to come up with a GUI named ImgMount, read more here.

haters will be haters

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Sep 282013

A person (which I believe is the author of another similar product, thus that other product is nagware and /or payware versus Tiny PXE Server being fully freeware) has been truly harrassing / spamming me over the last days claiming the ownership (if not copyright) around the kernel parameters I used for Ubuntu Live booting (cifs, nfs, etc) in previous articles.

I will recommend this page if you wish to understand more about which kernel parameter does what.

I consider syntax around products like grub4dos, syslinux, ipxe, distros kernels to be public knowledge and therefore free for everyone to copy paste, modify, re use.
Actually there are tons of forums and web sites out there experimenting and sharing findings and knowledge about this.
Some of my favorite forums being http://reboot.pro or iPxe.

Any dev guy claiming copyright over this syntax would (IMHO) look like a fool.

I will not approve comments over my blog around this topic.
Why? Because I can.

I purposedly will not mention or quote that guy harassing me simply.
Why? Because I do not want to encourage such behaviors and because that person does not deserved to be mentionned.

Topic closed…

SwitfSearch

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Sep 072013

Description

SwiftSearch is a lightweight program whose purpose is to help you quickly find the files you need on your Windows machine without ever requiring you to index your drives. Most search utilities that achieve similar speeds do so by indexing drives while the computer is idle, but because idleness detection is so difficult to get right, in practice they end up slowing down the whole system just to speed up search. SwiftSearch works differently: given administrator privileges, it completely bypasses the file system (only NTFS supported) and reads the file table directly every time, which speeds up search by many orders of magnitude. Typically searches yield full results in ~10 seconds or less, a significant speedup for many users. As a bonus, this program also supports path-based search (for example, you can search for « *Program*\Windows* »), regular expressions (just start the search name with ‘>’ character), and full directory sizes. Its goal is to be simple, swift, and intuitive to use.

Get it here