Tuesday, January 6, 2009

See, this is why I like open source software

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.