Question

I am trying to build my own C program that basically works just like fdisk vdisk ‘p’ command. I just want to be able to read in the first 512 bytes of the disk, lseek to the start of the partitions at (0x1BE) and then read the partition type, name, size, ect. I am unsure how to actually read these values. I have used the read() linux function to read in 512 bytes but when I try displaying/viewing them in any way, nothing is shown. What am I doing wrong?

int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
    int bytes_read;
    char mbr[512];
    int file;
    if(argc == 1) {
        // Print some help info
        printf ("Here is some help info: \n\n");
    } else if(argc < 3) {
        printf("File: %s\n\n", argv[1]);
        file = open(argv[1], O_RDONLY);
        lseek(bytes_read, 0, 0);
        //First get the MBR
        bytes_read = read(file, mbr, 512);
        printf("MBR=%s\n\nbytes_read=%d\n\n", mbr, bytes_read);
    } else {
        printf ("Incorrect usage: fdisk <disk>\n\n");
    }
}

Answer 1

Don’t try to use printf with binary data. If your binary data starts with a NUL (ASCII 0), then printf will assume you’ve got an empty string. You can use write() to write out arbitrary data (it takes a buffer and length), e.g:

#include <unistd.h>

write(STDOUT_FILENO, mbr, 512)

…but even this won’t necessarily display anything useful, because your terminal may try to interpret control characters in the output. You’re best bet would then be to pipe the output to something like xxd or od, both of which will produce a hexdump of their input data.

For example, the first 512 bytes of my local drive are all NUL. Using write() in your code (and removing that lseek) results in 512 NUL bytes on output. Try passing something other than disk to your code, e.g.:

myexe /etc/passwd

The structure of a standard DOS MBR is documented here, suggesting that you might start with data structures like this:

struct _partition {
        uint8_t         status;
        uint8_t         chs_start[3];
        uint8_t         part_type;
        uint8_t         chs_end[3];
        uint32_t        lba_start;
        uint32_t        sectors;
};

And populate it something like this:

        fd = open(target, O_RDONLY);
        lseek(fd, 446, SEEK_SET);
        for (i=0; i<4; i++) {
                struct _partition p;

                bytes_read = read(fd, &p, sizeof(struct _partition));

                // assume this prints information to stdout or something.
                print_part(i, &p);
        }