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disk diff

Posted: 13. Jan 2013, 03:57
by msangel%00
I have one virtual PC with WINDOWS. I want to run one program on that OS. But I need to find difference between hard disk before i run program and after.
I know - program create new files, edit existing and write some values to system registry. And I need to detect all these changes.

How do i do it?

I thougth this is possible via snapshots meneger but i found no such option there - see ataachment.

Re: disk diff

Posted: 13. Jan 2013, 12:12
by mpack
That is beyond the scope of these forums. However, quick answer: image the disk before and after, then run some kind of comparison tool on the raw images. Exactly what you would do on a physical PC. Since this has nothing to do with VirtualBox (or with Windows Hosts for that matter), I will not be willing to engage in a lengthy discussion about this.

The file format details of snapshot VDI files can be found in the VirtualBox sources. If you wrote your own program to process them in a special way then yes they could also do what you want. I'm not sure what you thought you might find useful in the UI.

Perhaps I should point out that a typical modern OS has a lot more than one program running at any one time. Even on my home PC that I keep lean and mean, there are 23 tasks currently running. On a less lean system there will be page files, temp files etc etc, filesystem reorderings, indexing etc all going on. So trying to hack that activation thing may be harder than you think. 8)