Access to physical disk devices in Windows 7

I just noticed that PhotoViewer, the program for putting photos on the first digital photo frame I hacked, did not need to run as Administrator. It simply opens the drive using CreateFileA() and a path like "\\.\D:". I could use the same sort of path to open another USB storage device, so Windows isn't somehow recognizing the photo frame and allowing this for compatibility.

The CreateFileA documentation tells you to use a path like "\\.\PhysicalDrive1", but that only works for me if run as Administrator.

There is a difference between the two paths: "\\.\D:" is a partition and "\\.\PhysicalDrive1" is an entire drive. However, if the drive is not partitioned, the two are effectively the same.

Cygwin works the same way. The physical drive is "/dev/sdb", requiring Administrator access, and the partition is "/dev/sdb1", not requiring administrator access. The first partition exists even if the drive is not partitioned, and then it is the same as the whole drive.

Opening for writing can fail sometimes if the device is in use, but otherwise, even a non-admin user can write to sectors. I can have a FAT32 formatted USB drive open in an Explorer window and simultaneously write to sectors altering the files there. It does not work with an NTFS formatted drive, so this is not as insecure as it might seem at first.