Drive (Sector) Editing
In addition to editing files, Hex Workshop can also edit Drive (Disk) Sectors. By selecting "Open Drive" from under the Disk menu, clicking the open drive Toolbar button, or using the Ctrl+D keycut both Logical and Physical Drives can be edited under Windows 95, 98, NT, Windows 2000, XP, and Vista.
NOTE: You must run Hex Workshop under Administrator Mode to sector edit under Vista. This can be accomplished by right-clicking on the launch shortcut and selecting "Run as administrator".
Logical Drives are drives mounted by the operating system and are given drive letters like "A:", "C:", "D:", etc. Hex Workshop can edit local drives, some CD-ROM drives, most removable media and floppy drives. You must have proper permission to edit these drives on Windows NT.
Physical Drives are the drives installed in your computer and are labeled as 0x80 for the first hard disk, 0x81 for the second, etc. You should edit physical drives when the operating system cannot mount your logical drive or you need to view and/or modify partition tables or unallocated space.
Disk Editing information is supplied to the user including sector number currently being edited and total number of sectors on the disk in the title bar, and sector size, cursor position (within the sector), and hex data interpretation in the status bar. The toolbar contains buttons to increment or decrement the current sector.
Drive Editing is accomplished in the same manner as file editing, with a few exceptions. Since the sector size is fixed, data cannot be inserted or deleted, only overwritten. The Goto utility becomes a Goto Sector Utility allowing movement forward or backward in sectors from the beginning, end, or current sector of the drive/disk. The Find Utility now operates on a range of sectors specified in the Find dialog, and Replace is disabled for sector editing.
Because of the slightly different nature of Drive Editing additional keycuts are available to help quickly move throughout the sectors of a disk.