Re: Writing File System Driver & Creating Virtual Disk Drive in Windows XP [Question by a Novice]

****What we dont know
1. how to show those reiserFS partitions in Windows Explorer?
2. even if we show reiserFS partition in windows explorer as a drive,
how our read call will be called when user tries to browse through this
drive?
3. thus the main question is what should we do in order to achieve
above result?
***How to show partitions in windows explorer?
***Do we have to write a file system driver to interface our read call,
with windows explorer clicks?

It does not work this way......

Before you start thinking about FS, first of all, you have to emulate a
virtual disk and its partitions. Therefore, I suggest you should start
from emulating the storage stack, and reporting your (unpartitioned,
for the time being) disk to PnP Manager. If you do it properly, your
virtual disk will appear in the control panel as unpartitioned one -
you don't have to "interface it to Windows Explorer"....

At this point you can add the code to emulate its partition(s) and
appear them as being formatted (for the time being you can format them
with FAT), so that logical volumes and FS may get mounted on them. At
this point it will appear on MyComputer panel, so that users will be
able to access it.


In other words, you have to interface your virtual disk to the system,
rather than to Windows Explorer.

When you start feeling comfortable with the storage stack (it may take
quite a while before it happens), you can already start thinking about
formatting your virtual disk with a custom file system and writing an
FS driver, and, as Skywing already told you, this is one of the most
complex projects that can be possibly imagined.

Anton Bassov



Ashish13 wrote:
Yup, may be it is very difficult to do this type of *Fully functional*
project for
newbies like us. [We are group of 3 students.]

But,
even if we can create a prototype for this concept,
then it will be very good achievement for us.

Our minimal goals are
1. Able to give only *read* access to say Reiser file system
2. Try to show these reiserFS partitions in windows explorer for easy
browsing

*****What we have now
1. We already have coded file system recogniser [by reading partition
tables n then magic strings-- this required Raw access to HDD]
2. Coding for ReiserFS read i.e. traversing ReiserFS tree, retrieving
data from direct and indirect items is under progress and we will
complete in coming 10 to 15 days.

****What we dont know
1. how to show those reiserFS partitions in Windows Explorer?
2. even if we show reiserFS partition in windows explorer as a drive,
how our read call will be called when user tries to browse through this
drive?
3. thus the main question is what should we do in order to achieve
above result?
***How to show partitions in windows explorer?
***Do we have to write a file system driver to interface our read call,
with windows explorer clicks?

Please share any links/ name of books you have, which will help in
such kind of activities.

Many thanks to Skywing for Commenting on this topic. :-)
_______________________________________________________________________
Skywing [MVP] wrote:
Full-blown filesystem drivers are extremely complicated and involve a lot of
subtleties relating to getting things like locking and right with the rest
of the system. I would not recommend it as a first project for someone new
to Windows kernel programming.

--
Ken Johnson (Skywing)
Windows SDK MVP
http://www.nynaeve.net
"Ashish13" <ashishbagate13@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1168195001.753632.308120@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Hello,

I am new to Windows Device Drivers/Internals.


We (a group of friends) want to do a project for windows XP, which can
be summarised as follows


1. When our code will run, it will identify all the hard-disk
partitions, and will detect the file systems in the each partition
2. After that, for ReiserFS partitions, ( virtual ) drives [like C: D:
etc.] will be created, which can be seen in Windows Explorer.
3. When user will double click on this drive or directories/files in
this drive a reiserfs-read-call [coded by us in this utility] will be
called to read the contents of the directory/files.


Thus an user can browse ReiserFS (a linux file system) from Windows XP
in windows explorer.


*** So Question is How To proceed about writing such kind of File
System Driver?
*** How much time will be required to code such a driver?


Please help, suggest some links because we all are new to this type of
work.


Thanking You and Hoping for reply,
Ashish


.

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