Write Bits Directly Onto a Hard Drive Platter?

kidcharles writes "I'm working on a project that requires writing bits to a magnetic hard drive platter in a completely controlled fashion. I need to be able to control exactly where 1s and 0s will appear physically on the platter. Normally when data is written to a drive the actual bits that get written are determined by the file system being used, as modified by whatever kind of error handling the drive itself is using (e.g. Reed-Solomon). All of the modern innovations in file systems and error handling are great for reliable and efficient data storage, but they are making my particular task quite daunting. My question for Slashdot: is there a way to get down to the 'bare metal' and write these bits? Any good utilities out there to do this? Obviously a free and open source solution would be preferable, but I'm open to anything at this point."

Comments

Re:Tell us your project?

[marcansoft]

He didn't even ask for a solution, he asked for a way to accomplish a poorly specified abstract task that is nontrivial. It's pot luck whether a solution will be valid, and chances are it won't, unless he explains the actual project. For example, if he's trying to test modern disk error correction by introducing errors, suggestions such as "use an old 20MB drive" are useless; on the other hand, if he is just experimenting with magnetism on a drive (e.g. even trying to write "analog" audio data onto a platter) then making his own drive controller for a modern drive is both ridiculously complicated and probably worse than just feeding audio data to an old stepper drive's heads.

Re:I tried it once

[xOneca]

That's not funny, you insensitive moderators!