thank you very much. yupe the setting was in the console app.

The logical drives (drive letters) identify partitions, not physical devices. It takes a couple of WMI objects to get most of the information you want; you will probably discover that the very physical characteristics (such as number of cylinders) don't make sense any more as they are virtualized within the drive itself; the local intelligence just makes the disk look like one heap of sectors. Also, the latest versions of Windows (Vista, 7) are likely to refuse full access, even read access, at the device level unless you are an elevated escalated super-administrator. :) Luc Pattyn [Forum Guidelines] [Why QA sucks] [My Articles] The Lion has roared

You're not going to do it in managed code. In the simplest form you can do this, it requires that Windows isn't running since there will be plenty of areas of the disk that will be locked and unavailable to even be read. I wrote an app to do this way back in 1991, written in C and running from a DOS boot floppy. I was duplicating hard drives for the mass production of "laptop" computers for Prudential Insurance. Every machine has a standard DOS/Windows/software load that had to be on about 450 machines. For those keeping score, Ghost came out 2 years later in 1993. Yeah, there's my :doh: moment! ...had I only known there was a market... A guide to posting questions on CodeProject[^] Dave Kreskowiak Microsoft MVP Visual Developer - Visual Basic      2006, 2007, 2008 But no longer in 2009...

Well, if you completed reading the post, you would have seen the links to Google results for examples. There is no way you can explain all of the ins and outs of NTFS, how to read and interpret MFTs, search for and recover the "lost" chains, and put them back into the tables as a coherent file, all in a couple of forum posts. I gave him exactly what he asked for - hints. If you want to try and explain all that without writing a small book, be my guest. All you have to do is reply to the OP. A guide to posting questions on CodeProject[^] Dave Kreskowiak Microsoft MVP Visual Developer - Visual Basic      2006, 2007, 2008 But no longer in 2009...