I have two removable drives. I can set the access rights so that they can be shared and used from another network computer, but when I start my main computer the next time and the drives are switched off, they seem to lose the share settings and I have to set the access rights again.
Is there a way to prevent this and to automatically share a complete drive so that it can be accessed across the network as soon as it is switched on the next time?
The long and the short of it is "No"... I had the same issue with a removable drive and there's not a way to do it. You CAN however, write a small service that will share the drive automatically on boot-up. Short of that, Windows just simply will not re-share a removable drive after reboot.
~md5sum~
I've had this problem, and after some research came to this registry solution that increases the number of shared removable drives that windows retains (why Windows is worried about not having enough space to remember unlimited numbers of shares is beyond me). http://forums.cnet.com/7726-6122_102-3230783.html#3230783
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I create a backup of the physical (encrypted) sectors of a BitLocker-encrypted volume (by reading them directly from \\.\PhysicalDrive0).
Then I format the volume as a non-encrypted volume, thus removing the BitLocker encryption and converting the encrypted volume to a non-encrypted one.
After that, I restore the physical (encrypted) sectors by writing them directly to \\.\PhysicalDrive0. The writing works fine, but:
The problem:
Windows does not realize the volume has changed from a non-encrypted one to a BitLocker-encrypted one. I tried calling DeviceIOControl() with IOCTL_DISK_UPDATE_PROPERTIES, to no avail.
Only after a restart (or removing and then re-inserting the drive, if it is removable) does Windows realize that there is a new BitLocker-encrypted volume in the system.
Question:
Is there any way to programmatically force a refresh of the BitLocker volumes, after I'm done writing the physical sectors? So far, this only works if I take the ENTIRE drive offline and then back online, but I cannot do this, since that drive also contains other volumes, which I cannot take offline, not even temporarily.
PS: The code does run with admin privileges. I did lock/unlock the volume. I did dismount the volume's file system. To no avail. I'm out of ideas. Thanks.
I am trying to install Linux in a computer that has Windows 7. The first step was shrinking the disk size but Windows did not allow any reduction. Thus I followed a number of steps to disable "unmovable" files
I disabled the Page File
I disabled hibernation
I disabled System Protection
After that nothing seemed to have changed so I checked the disk fragmentation and it was 11% fragmented. I have since then run at least 4 defrags and I have also defragged the free space using Defraggler.
As of now the disk looks like this
Right now, Windows refuses to shrink the partition by any amount (I imagine that the files at the end of the disk are the troublesome ones).
Coming from an Linux background I am unsure what else needs to be done in order to shrink the partition.
Are you using Windows disk management tool to do the shrink? Here's a link for that method.
https://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/resize-a-partition-for-free-in-windows-vista/
Also make sure the recycle bin on that drive is empty.
I finally figured it out.
The easiest way is just to use a Live USB with GParted on it since that will allow you to move Windows protected files around (the windows OS is not loaded on the live distro).
If just defragmenting is concerned one can use Hiren's Boot CD and the included Defraggler for the same purpose.
I had the same problem on Windows 10. Turns out it was antivirus software that was running on the machine that prevented defragmentation happen properly. I actually had to temporarily uninstall antivirus. After that, the Disk Management tool was able to correctly shrink the volume.
I work on-the-side doing computer repair. Standard operating procedure is to pop out the HDD/SSD, mount it to a backup machine, and pull the client's data (i.e., in case the drive fails/something goes horribly wrong, their data is protected). More and more often, my office is seeing SSDs soldered directly to the motherboard, making this technique impossible.
I was wondering if any of you knew of a some method that would allow direct disk access without drive removal. An analogue would be mounting a phone in Mass Storage Device mode, I suppose. This may be possible already by doing something with a Linux LiveUSB, but I'm not sure how. Booting from a LiveUSB and transferring files over the network is unacceptably slow given the volume of computers we see and amount of data involved.
On Apple computers, this is simple--plug in a Thunderbolt/Firewire connector and use Target Disk Mode to pull directly from the drive.
tl;dr: making a backup of a Windows computer without opening them: how do?
Boot a live Linux from a large USB3 HDD, and use the same disk to copy the client's data to with about USB3 speed.
I want to move my program to USB memory stick. It will run only on memory stick and would not be copied (written on C# and has nearly 3GB of database).
Where can I find a good source for that and/or how can I do that?
What you described can't reasonably be done. If a user can run the program, they can run it. It doesn't matter whether they loaded it from your USB stick or not. You can write it such that it assumes it's being run from the USB stick (with relative paths, per #Kos's comment) but that will in no way prevent people from copying it to their hard drives and running it. Since you don't know where a USB stick will be mounted ahead of time, you can't even use absolute paths.
Allow me to disagree with nmichaels, it is possible to check in C# if your running from removable storage or hard drive.
Check this thread: How to detect if any specific drive is a hard drive?
However, it would be too easy to reverse the thing and allow it to run on hard drives.
As an additional protection, you can read the USB drive serial and if it doesn't match, kill the program.
OR... you if want to be hardcore, use a specific USB drive model, and read the VID/PID, or the chip itself (check mass production tool).
In the end, if the program worths it, someone would still reverse it and break the protection scheme :)
I'm need to find a method to programmatically determine which disk drive Windows is using to boot. In other words, I need a way from Windows to determine which drive the BIOS is using to boot the whole system.
Does Windows expose an interface to discover this? With how big the Windows API is, I'm hoping there is something buried in there that might do the trick.
Terry
p.s. Just reading the first sectors of the hard disk isn't reveling anything. On my dev box I have two hard disks, and when I look at the contents of the first couple of sectors on either of the hard disks I have a standard boiler plate MBR.
Edit to clarify a few things.
The way I want to identify the device is with a string which will identify a physical disk drive (as opposed to a logical disk drive). Physical disk drives are of the form "\\.\PHYSICALDRIVEx" where x is a number. On the other hand, a logical drive is identified by a string of the form, "\\.\x" where x is a drive letter.
Edit to discuss a few of the ideas that were thrown out.
Knowing which logical volume Windows used to boot doesn't help me here. Here is the reason. Assume that C: is using a mirrored RAID setup. Now, that means we have at least two physical drives. Now, I get the mapping from Logical Drive to Physical Drive and I discover that there are two physical drives used by that volume. Which one did Windows use to boot? Of course, this is assuming that the physical drive Windows used to boot is the same physical drive that contains the MBR.
Go into Control Panel
System and Security
Administrative Tools
Launch the System Configuration tool
If you have multiple copies of Windows installed, the one you are booted with will be named such as:
Windows 7 (F:\Windows)
Windows 7 (C:\Windows) : Current OS, Default OS
Unless C: is not the drive that windows booted from.Parse the %SystemRoot% variable, it contains the location of the windows folder (i.e. c:\windows).
You can use WMI to figure this out. The Win32_BootConfiguration class will tell you both the logical drive and the physical device from which Windows boots. Specifically, the Caption property will tell you which device you're booting from.
For example, in powershell, just type gwmi Win32_BootConfiguration to get your answer.
That depends on your definition of which disk drive Windows used to boot. I can think of 3 different answers on a standard BIOS system (who knows what an EFI system does):
The drive that contains the active MBR
The active partition, with NTLDR (the system partition)
The partition with Windows on it (the boot partition)
2 and 3 should be easy to find - I'm not so sure about 1. Though you can raw disk read to find an MBR, that doesn't mean it's the BIOS boot device this time or even next time (you could have multiple disks with MBRs).
You really can't even be sure that the PC was started from a hard drive - it's perfectly possible to boot Windows from a floppy. In that case, both 1 and 2 would technically be a floppy disk, though 3 would remain C:\Windows.
You might need to be a bit more specific in your requirements or goals.
You type diskpart, list disk and check disks for boot.
Ex:
dispart
list disk
select disk 0
detail disk
The disk with Boot volume is disk with windows installed:
There is no boot.ini on a machine with just Vista installed.
How do you want to identify the drive/partition: by the windows drive letter it is mapped to (eg. c:\, d:) or by how its hardware signature (which bus, etc).
For the simple case check out GetSystemDirectory
Try HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\Setup\SystemPartition
You can try use simple command line. bcdedit is what you need, just run cmd as administrator and type bcdedit or bcdedit \v, this doesn't work on XP, but hope it is not an issue.
Anyway for XP you can take a look into boot.ini file.
a simpler way
search downloads in the start menu and click on downloads in the search results to see where it will take you the drive will be highlighted in the explorer.
On Windows 10.
Open "Computer Management"
Look for "Storage" in list "left top side of page"
select "Disk Management"
On section of page showing the list of disks and the partitions find the disk that has the partition assigned as drive C:
On that disk containing C: partition
Use the right mouse button to select the Square section containing The Disk Number, Type of drive and size in GB . When menu opens select the Properties.
A window will open showing what drive hardware was used.