Question

I was wondering how hard disk access works. Ex, how could I view/modify sectors? Im targeting Windows if that helps.
Thanks

Answer 1

This page seems to have some relevant information on the subject:

You can open a physical or logical
drive using the CreateFile()
application programming interface
(API) with these device names provided
that you have the appropriate access
rights to the drive (that is, you must
be an administrator). You must use
both the CreateFile() FILE_SHARE_READ
and FILE_SHARE_WRITE flags to gain
access to the drive.

Once the logical or physical drive has
been opened, you can then perform
direct I/O to the data on the entire
drive. When performing direct disk
I/O, you must seek, read, and write in
multiples of sector sizes of the
device and on sector boundaries. Call
DeviceIoControl() using
IOCTL_DISK_GET_DRIVE_GEOMETRY to get
the bytes per sector, number of
sectors, sectors per track, and so
forth, so that you can compute the
size of the buffer that you will need.

The documentation of CreateFile also offers some clues:

You can use the CreateFile function to open a physical disk drive or a volume,
which returns a direct access storage device (DASD) handle that can be
used with the DeviceIoControl function. This enables you to access the
disk or volume directly, for example such disk metadata as the partition
table. However, this type of access also exposes the disk drive or
volume to potential data loss, because an incorrect write to a disk
using this mechanism could make its contents inaccessible to the
operating system. To ensure data integrity, be sure to become
familiar with DeviceIoControl and how other APIs behave
differently with a direct access handle as opposed to a file system handle.