I'm working on learning more about Microsoft's Sysinternals. There are a lot of really handy sounding utilities, and too many for me to keep track of. I was looking through the disk utils, and I found LDMDump. It's a utility that prints out information on the logical disk scheme. Here's a quote from the utility's page:
"There are no published APIs available for obtiaining detailed information about a disk's LDM partitioning, and the LDM database format is completely undocumented. LDMDump was developed based on study of LDM database contents on a variety of different systems and under changing conditions."
Now, I ask you...how ridiculous is it that a Microsoft-paid developer has to resort to essentially reverse engineering a partitioning scheme to figure out how it works? "The LDM database format is completely undocumented". Unreal.
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
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6 comments:
It is somewhat ridiculous. Though in fairness I think those utilities were developed before Sysinternals was bought by MS, so it may be that when it was developed he didn't have access to docs (if there are any!).
That may be, but it's been a few years, and if that's the only tool available to describe the layout, then it should really be updated.
The whole situation with closed source just doesn't lend itself to outside cooperation, which I suppose is the point. It's remarkable that sysinternals was created at all.
Sysinternals was not always Microsoft.
They had their own website, with processxp which is a real good task manager, amongst other tools.
It was just later that all the tools moved to the Microsoft website.
LDMDump is just one of these tools that were developed by Sysinternals, not Microsoft.
It's not entirely shocking to find programs without decent documentation. Programmers do generally seem to make poor documenters.
In a lot of ways, the story is actually even more interesting. The Sysinternals tools were originally developed by Mark Russinovich completely independently of Microsoft. On top of that, the source code was available for them, too!
Then, Microsoft hired Mark and bought the Sysinternals tools, moved them to Microsoft's website (well, most of them anyway. . . they killed off a few of them), and removed all access to the source code. In the end, we're left with just a shadow of what used to be an amazing resource.
@Everyone
wow, that's shameful of Microsoft, even more than I thought before. Was the software GPL'd before Microsoft closed it? It could be forked, if so.
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