Save and Restore Sectors on Physical Disk

BestCrypt Volume Encryption allows the user to save contents of sectors from a physical disk to a file. It is also possible to overwrite contents of sectors with data from a file. The functionality may be useful, for example, if you decide to investigate how modifying some encrypted data affects the security and reliability aspects of Volume Encryption. For example, what happens if you modify one byte in sector that belongs to encrypted volume.

WARNING! Overwriting disk sectors is a potentially dangerous operation! It is possible to overwrite filesystem structures or system files! Run the operation only if you are absolutely sure that sectors you modify do not belong to the system area on the disk or to some system file.

To save sectors from a physical disk, click Save sectors in the View Physical Sectors on Disk dialog window. The following window will appear:

Save sector from disk

Enter Start sector from where the data should be saved to file and Number of sectors that have to be saved in corresponding edit boxes. Browse the file or type new file name in the Save sectors to file edit box. Click Start saving to save the sectors or Exit to quit the dialog without saving sectors.

To overwrite (restore) sectors on some physical disk, click Restore sectors in the View Physical Sectors on Disk dialog window. In the dialog that appears, you should enter name of the file from where the data will be written to physical sector(s). Also enter the number of the Start sector and the Number of sectors on physical disk where the data should be overwritten. The following picture illustrates Restore sectors dialog.

Overwrite sector on disk

The Restore sectors dialog shows contents of the file you have selected in sector-by-sector form, to demonstrate what data will appear on the physical disk after completing the process. Please verify once again that it is exactly the data you want to appear in the disk sectors.


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