file shredder in vb?[resolved]

[dark_shadow]

hey does anyone know if its even possible to make a file shredder in vb? or is it not powerful enough to delete data at that level?

[leinad31]

You need to access the HDD at low level... not with VB exclusively (with dll's written in other languages) if I'm not mistaken.

[MartinLiss]

Couldn't you simply open the file(s) I/O and write new data to it/tem?

[leinad31]

It could be written on another portion of the HDD just like memory allocation with FAT/etc table updated accordingly... the previously written data on the HDD is still there (until overwritten by another HDD operation) and can be read with low level HDD access recovery apps.

Unless I misinterpreted his question (he just wants to corrupt file data) and went overboard ^^

[dark_shadow]

i dont know if you over stepped it or not basically there are shredders that you can get that completely deletes files off of a hdd and i didnt know if you could still access it from vb ot you need a more powerful language to do it

[Hack]

Post #2 would seem to be your best bet.

[dark_shadow]

hmm alright what language would you say the dlls would be coded in ? c++ probally ?

[DigiRev]

hmm alright what language would you say the dlls would be coded in ? c++ probally ?

Most likely.

[dark_shadow]

hmm alright thanks for the replies i'll look in to it

[DigiRev]

You could also try posting in the C++ forum.

[Arne Elster]

You need to access the HDD at low level... not with VB exclusively (with dll's written in other languages) if I'm not mistaken.

Neither C++ nor ASM have more priviledges then VB in a user process.
That means every single bit a C++ program can do in a user process
can also be done by a VB program.

    Dim btSector(511) As Byte
    
    Open "\\.\C:" For Binary As #1
        Get #1, , btSector
    Close #1

Will read the first sector of drive C into btSector.
Works very well on XP with admin priviledges, should also work on 2k, may work on NT (if not, use CreateFile() API with correct access flags).
On 98/Me you can use some DeviceIoControl() to read or write directly to the drive.
http://vbcity.com/forums/topic.asp?tid=6975
Doesn't have 64 bit integer support, but that's not that hard to add.

It could be written on another portion of the HDD just like memory allocation with FAT/etc table updated accordingly...

I doubt that. There is no reason to do so as long as you don't append bytes to the file.
I think there is an API for flushing the write cache to disk.