How to read disk partition in java

Question

Is it possible to read whole partition of disk in java?

Partition is treated as directory (obviously) and because of it I can't create FileInputStream which I need.

I'd like to compute hash for whole partition of disk (byte by byte) and I was wondering how to achieve that.

If that matters it has to work both on Windows and Linux.

Any thoughts are appreciated!

You can do this on unix by reading the raw device e.g. `/dev/sd1c` There might be an equivalent for windows. — Peter Lawrey, Mar 25 '14 at 14:14
possible duplicate of [Get partition and volume information](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15656139/get-partition-and-volume-information) — Vishrant, Mar 25 '14 at 14:27
@PeterLawrey thanks, that should work on linux, but I still can't find equivalent solution on Windows. — ICeQ, Mar 25 '14 at 14:45
@Vishrant I think that's not related, I need to read partition byte by byte, not just get informations about it. — ICeQ, Mar 25 '14 at 14:46
for a sake of curiosity, why you want to read partition in that way, why don't you get the list of files and read it. — Vishrant, Mar 25 '14 at 14:58
As I mentioned in the question I have to compute hash for whole partition, but not like computing hashes for all files and make it somehow in one hash, but compute it like for one big file. — ICeQ, Mar 25 '14 at 15:02

score 2 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 11:49

2

Try that with administrator's permissions:

File diskRoot = new File ("\\.\X:"); //X is your requested partition's letter 
RandomAccessFile diskAccess = new RandomAccessFile(diskRoot, "r");
byte[] content = new byte[1024];
diskAccess.readFully (content);

You can also use BufferedInputStream. It's the hunsricker's answer from How to access specific raw data on disk from java

The naming convention can be found here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/100027

edited May 23 '17 at 11:49

Community

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answered Mar 25 '14 at 15:47

Michal

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Thanks for hint - especially for naming convention in windows - that helped a lot! In fact, that didn't worked, because RandomAccesFile#read(), readFully() and other read functions throws java.io.Exception: Parameter is invalid. But I made it work with just InputStream (solution below). – ICeQ Mar 28 '14 at 11:05

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 28 '14 at 11:04

As @Michal suggested I've changed path to partition to "\\.\X:" convention.

Code looks like this:

File diskRoot = new File("\\\\.\\F:");
byte[] buffer = new byte[1024];
try (InpuStream stream = new FileInputStream(diskRoot)) {
    while(stream.read(buffer) != -1) {
        //do something with buffer
    }
} catch(IOException e) {
    //handle exception
}

Thanks for the comments and answers!

How to read disk partition in java

2 Answers2