Hard disk drive hashing ?

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Looking for some code which can hash an entire physical hard disk for a project

Need to Hash Disk Drive/Solid State Drives while Cloning & Imaging

What I have tried:

Have tried searching over how to implement hashing for physical drive but didn't find anything concrete.

Posted 1-Apr-19 1:00am

Member 14207297

Updated 1-Apr-19 1:51am

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Nirav Prabtani 1-Apr-19 7:01am

Why do you need to do hashing of entire hard disk ??

Member 14207297 1-Apr-19 7:06am

To determine that the disk data copied from the source disk0 to destination disk1 100% replicated including free areas

#realJSOP 1-Apr-19 7:18am

How do you expect to hash free space on a drive?

Member 14207297 1-Apr-19 7:41am

We need to consider Physical Drive instead of Logical drive. In this case we read the entire drive in raw format. This can be viewed through hex viewer sector by sector. So now hash values need to be generated by considering a drive data bit-by-bit or else sector by sector. This will help to generate hash of entire physical drive.

Richard MacCutchan 1-Apr-19 7:40am

You need to access the raw sectors to read the entire drive. Google for samples and explanations.

Member 14207297 1-Apr-19 7:43am

Can you share a few samples specifically in C++ language.

#realJSOP 1-Apr-19 7:50am

He said google for the info. It's probably extensive and is not suitable for posting here.

Richard MacCutchan 1-Apr-19 7:51am

See https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/help/100027/info-direct-drive-access-under-win32[^].

Member 14207297 1-Apr-19 8:10am

I am able to access hard drives through createfile() and even read the whole hard disk .
Now I need assistance to generate hash value (MD5 or SHA1) post cloning data on another drive or creating image file

Richard MacCutchan 1-Apr-19 8:42am

Google will find you plenty of samples of MD5 hashing.

Member 14207297 1-Apr-19 9:09am

I am aware of MD5 hashing with file/text but need assistance with entire disk hashing .
For example, header file with function and what parameter's to pass.

Richard MacCutchan 1-Apr-19 9:42am

The form of the source data is irrelevant. A hash algorithm just reads streams of bytes and creates a value from them. Whether it comes from a file, a raw disk, an internet connection, makes no difference.

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OriginalGriff · Answer 1 · 2019-04-01T01:51:00

Hashing works on a byte stream, or similar - it doesn't care where you get it's data from. So as long as you can read your free space you can include it in the hash value. I wouldn't though, for the same reasons that most backup systems don't - it's technically irrelevant data which takes up valuable backup space, was well as being a potential security risk.

Whatever bytes you provide to the hashing algorithm will be used to generate the hash code, so you can use any hashing algorithm you feel appropriate. I'd suggest MD5 for this, despite it being "broken" since there is no attempt to reverse the code and this isn't a security application - it's a lot faster than SHA-512 or similar and will provide a similar level of "confirmation".

A quick google will find you loads of info on MD5 and SHA hashes.