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Frequently Asked Questions
If You Need Technical Support
For your convenience, a list of frequently asked questions is provided below. Please be sure to review this list, as it is very possible that your question has already been answered here. If the solution you seek is not here, please feel free to contact our technical support.
General
Q: Why does FlexHEX report wrong physical drive size on Win NT?
A: Windows NT and 2000 assume any physical drive has 512 bytes per sector, 63 sectors per track, and 255 tracks per cylinder. If your drive has a different geometry or no geometry at all (like USB flash drives), Windows returns the closest value, so the error may be as large as 8 Mb. Windows XP introduced a new function that returns the true drive size in addition to the geometry parameters, so FlexHEX reports the correct physical drive size on Windows XP/2003 and Vista.
Q: FlexHEX reports a read error at the end of a flash card.
A: Some flash card readers have a bug in their control logic, reporting the card size 512 bytes larger than the actual size. As a result, FlexHEX reports an error when it attempts to access the non-existing area at the end of the card. This error usually remains unnoticed because FAT32 clusters are always larger than 512 bytes, and the small 512-byte long tail remains unallocated during card formatting.
Note also that you can see this error on Windows XP and later systems only. Windows NT and 2000 report a card size incorrectly (see above), thus compensating for the control logic bug. It is hard to tell how many card readers have that bug (at least some USB 1.1 readers do). In any case, nothing can be done about it - just ignore this error.
Q: I could not open a dll/exe file.
A: Actually you can open an executable file while it is being executed - it is just you can't edit it. The system won't allow opening such a file for read/write access. It is simply not possible to modify a running executable aside from directly modifying the file's sectors.
In order to edit a running dll/exe file, either terminate the executable and re-open the file for read/write access, or select the File / Save As menu command to create a copy of the file.
Starting with version 2.2, FlexHEX permits you to edit locked files, including executables being run.
Q: I could not open a network drive. Network drives are not shown in the logical drive list.
A: Windows™ does not allow accessing a drive over the network. What you can access is an object called network share, which can represent a drive, a directory, or even some non-filesystem object like printer. However, even if a share represents a drive, it is impossible to obtain a raw, non-file-based access to it.
Mapping a share to a drive letter does not change the situation. The drive letter in this case is just a symbolic name, and does not represent a real drive. The same is true for "drives" created by the subst command - you can access files there, yet you cannot open the drive itself because it is not really a drive.
Q: I saved a sparse file, and the sparse areas were converted to real zeros.
A: FlexHEX allows creating sparse zero areas of any size, however the system may change the layout. If a sparse area fits into the file buffer, it will be converted to real zeros. The size of the real data block is always rounded to some boundary which may be as large as 64k.
Once the file is saved, FlexHEX re-reads the actual region layout and updates the Edit window and the Region pane accordingly.
Q: I am running FlexHex as administrator but keep getting acess denied message on save. Any suggestions?
A: Running as administrator does not mean you have full unrestricted access. In fact, those are unrelated issues.
There are several possible reasons for 'access denied':
1. Access is restricted by the security descriptor. In this case just fix it - being an administrator, you can always edit security descriptors.
2. The file is locked by another application. If this is the case, you can edit and save it in FlexHex as a 'locked file'. However, editing locked files is not a recommended practice because this can lead to an unpredictable result.
3. Hardware reasons, namely a read-only device or a restricted network share. Nothing can be done here.
Trying to delete/move/replace the file using the Windows Explorer usually gives enough information to understand what's going on.
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