Opening a block device in Windows

davies has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I'm trying to write something to check for falsely reported sizes on USB & similar drives. Opening them in Linux is trivial, even for someone who knows as little about Linux as I do. Thanks to Mr. Muskrat's post (Win32) Hard Drive Information and AnthonyC's thread Windows drive letter mapping question(++ to all), I have got a lot of useful code. Hard coding as much as possible, I was hoping that the snippet below would work. Sadly, I get a "Permission denied" error. I am logged in as administrator, so I was not expecting permissions to be a problem. Googling has got me nowhere. Can anyone point me to any helpful docs?

use strict;
use warnings;

open my $fh, "<", '\\\\MYCOMPUTER\\root\\cimv2:Win32_LogicalDisk.Devic
+eID="G:"' or die $!;
[download]

Regards,

John Davies

Comment on Opening a block device in Windows Download Code

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Re: Opening a block device in Windows by Corion (Patriarch) on Feb 14, 2013 at 09:50 UTC
If you really want direct access to the raw device, like `/dev/sdx` under unixish/linuxish systems, you can open `\\.\F:` (permissions provided), potentially using `CreateFile()` via Win32::API. Also see this MSDN article on direct drive access, espcecially if you don't have a drive letter yet.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^2: Opening a block device in Windows by bulk88 (Priest) on Feb 15, 2013 at 00:57 UTC
Win32API::File is the correct way to access CreateFile in Perl.	[reply]

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