Hello, I am writing a Python program to read the Master Boot Record (MBR), and I'm having trouble because I have no previous experience reading binary files.
First off, I've written a binary file containing the MBR to disk using the following command: sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=/tmp/mbrcontent bs=1 count=512 Then I want to read the MBR file and parse out its information. For example, I know that bytes 454-457 contain the address of the first sector of the first partition, and bytes 458-461 contain the number of sectors in the first partition (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_boot_record for more information on the structure of the MBR). So far what I have is this: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- f = open("/tmp/mbrcontent", "rb") contents = f.read() f.close() firstSectorAddress = contents[454:458] numSectors = contents[458:462] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- On my machine, the bytes contained in firstSectorAddress are "\x3F\x00\x00\x00", and the bytes contained in numSectors are "\x20\x1F\x80\x01". I know from doing a pen and paper calculation that the first sector address is 63, and the number of sectors is 25,173,792 (the numbers are stored in little-endian format). How do I figure that out programmatically? I think that I can use struct.unpack() to do this, but I'm not quite sure how to use it. Can anybody help me out? Thanks in advance. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
