Direct access to hard disk with no FS from C program on Linux

Question

I want to access the whole hard disk directly from a C program. There's no FS on it and never's gonna be one.

I just want to open /dev/sda (for example) and do I/O at the block/sector level of the disk.

I'm planning to write some programs for learning C programming in the Linux environment (I know C language, Python, Perl and Java) but lack confidence with the Linux environment.

For my learning purposes I'm thinking about playing with kyoto-cabinet and saving the value corresponding to the computed hash directly into a "block/sector" of the hard disk, recording the pair: "hash, block/sector reference" into a kyoto-cabinet hash database file.

I don't know if this is feasible using standard C I/O functions or otherwise I'd have to write a "device driver" or something like...

Answer 1

As mentioned elsewhere, under *NIX systems, block devices like /dev/sda can be accessed as plain files. Note that if file system is mounted from the device, opening it as file for writing would fail.

If you want to play with block devices, I would advise to first use the loop device, which presents a plain file as a block device. For example:

dd if=/dev/zero of=./loop_file_10MB bs=1024 count=10K
losetup /dev/loop0 $PWD/loop_file_10MB

After that, /dev/loop0 would behave as if it was a block device, but all information written would be stored in the file.

Answer 2

As device files for drives (e.g. /dev/sda) are block devices, this means you can open, seek and use the file almost like a normal file.