Saving Sectors

Help on how to use HxD.
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DougCuk
Posts: 1
Joined: 13 Mar 2011 10:29

Saving Sectors

Post by DougCuk »

Compliments on a very useful tool.
I have used hex editors since the days of DOS - yours is very slick.

I have a question about the Extras -> Open Disk mode:
It appears you do not allow selected sectors to be saved as raw binary.

I did a forum search and found the following thread from 2008
http://forum.mh-nexus.de/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=239#p699

Which has the following statement as the last post:
"Save to file saves the entire file (disk/RAM), not only a portion. That is intentional."

Saving blocks of raw sectors from the physical disk (outside the defined partitions) would be very helpful.
I wanted to test some hidden code stored in these locations to see if it was part of a RootKit/BootKit infection.
Several utilities exist to dump track zero - but a more flexible solution would be better.

Is there some technical reason the "Select Block + Save As" combination can not just save the raw sectors to a file?

Doug Collins - Computer Support Engineer
Maël
Site Admin
Posts: 1455
Joined: 12 Mar 2005 14:15

Re: Saving Sectors

Post by Maël »

DougCuk wrote: Saving blocks of raw sectors from the physical disk (outside the defined partitions) would be very helpful.
[...]Is there some technical reason the "Select Block + Save As" combination can not just save the raw sectors to a file?
What you can do is use the clipboard. Select, Copy, Paste into new file, save.
But this is limited by the amount of free working memory (RAM).
There are no technical reasons such a feature doesnt exist yet, except lack of time currently. There are plans to add a feature to save selected portions of a file (or a disk which is treated like a file) to another file.
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