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How can I access and write to the unallocated space of a Hard Disk Drive, from Windows ?
By unallocated HDD space I’m referring to the space that remains on the HDD after partitions have been created, or just free space on the HDD that has not been assigned to a partition.
You need to read the partition table of the hard disk, find the unallocated space, then read that space. Such operations require direct access to disk. Before Vista it was possible to call CreateFile(“special name of the disk itself”) to open the disk like a file. In Vista and Windows 7 it’s not possible anymore due to security restrictions of Windows (at least for non-admin account). You can use our RawDisk product to access disk sectors for reading and writing in Vista and later systems. Note, that RawDisk includes a kernel-mode driver which needs administrative rights to be installed (which rights are not always available).