Navigating to Key Sectors

To navigate to key sectors on the open item:

  1. To open a different device or logical drive:

    • Click Open Disk from the File menu, or press Ctrl+O. The Open Disk dialog box appears.

    • Click a device or logical drive to select it, then click Open.

    • The Active@ Disk Editor workspace appears with the selected item.

  2. To jump to a named sector or offset:

    • From the Navigate menu, choose Go to Offset or Go to Sector. The Go to Offset/Sector dialog box opens.

    • To jump to a specific offset, enter the offset value as a decimal number. Use the prefix 0x for hexadecimal values.

    • To jump to a specific sector, enter the sector number in the Sector field. To jump to a specific cluster, enter the cluster number in the Cluster field.

    • Click OK. The specified sector or offset appears in the editing panel.

  3. To jump to the volume boot sector:

    From the Navigate menu, choose Boot Sector(0). The boot sector appears in the editing panel.

  4. To jump to the partition table:

    From the Navigate menu, choose Partition Table. The partition table sector appears in the editing panel.

    Note:

    This option applies only to physical drives (HDDs, SSDs, etc.) and not to logical drives such as partitions or volumes.

  5. To edit the partition table:

    • From the Navigate menu, choose Partition Table. Navigation will be positioned at sector 0, and the Master Boot Record template will be applied. The signature (55 AA) at the end of sector zero marks the end of the partition table.

    • Review the settings for partition table entries 1 through 4 in the Template View on the left side of the workspace.

    • Enable edit mode by pressing Ctrl+Alt+E and modify the partition table parameters as needed.

    • To save changes, click Save.

  6. Jump to a number of named sectors

    From the Navigate menu, you can jump to a number of named sectors, each listed with its name and a sector number specific to your hard drive:

    • To jump to the unallocated boot sector, choose Unallocated Space[your partition size GB]) > Boot Sector(your sector number).

    • To jump to various primary NTFS locations, choose Primary NTFS [your partition size GB] and then select one of the following:

      • Boot Sector(your sector number) — jumps to the primary boot sector.
      • Boot Sector Copy(your sector number) — jumps to the primary boot sector copy.
      • $MFT(your sector number) — jumps to the MFT (Master File Table) sector.
      • $MFT Mirror(your sector number) — jumps to the MFT mirror sector.