I am developing an application in which it would be very useful to keep track of all the activities on the hard drive. I use Diskmon to track activity and IOMeter to make specific requests to the disk. Everything is fine, except that Diskmon only recognizes real hard drives, and, unfortunately, I only have one physical drive on the computers available to me. This drive has one partition for windows. Therefore, whenever an application or anything on Windows makes a disk request, it is displayed as extraneous data in the Diskmon log file.
As such, I am curious to know if there is anyway to create a "virtual hard drive", which is essentially a regular hard drive in relation to Windows? I tried to create a virtual hard disk (VHD) supported by Windows 7. To my knowledge, it really looks like a hard disk because it appears in My Computer as a new disk. Even IOMeter chooses VHD. However, Diskmon does not distinguish between VHD and the true drive on which it resides. Thus, the virtual disk function (VHD) does nothing to achieve my goal. My guess is that the Diskmon application uses lower-level Windows APIs, in which the difference between regular disk data and virtual disks is trivial.
Is it possible to create a real virtual disk that even logmon logging can identify as a real hard disk? Ideally, I would like to create such a virtual drive on a USB key, but from what I currently see, the only option would be to buy an external hard drive.
Any help is much appreciated! Thanks
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