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A disk editor is a computer program that allows its user to read, edit, and write raw data (at ASCII or hexadecimal, byte) on disk drives (e.g., , USB flash disks or removable media such as a ); as such, they are sometimes called sector editors, since the read/write routines built into the electronics of most disk drives require to read/write data in chunks of disk sector (usually 512 bytes). Many disk editors can also be used to edit the contents of a running computer's computer memory or a disk image.
Unlike , which are used to edit Computer file, a disk editor allows access to the underlying disk structures, such as the master boot record (MBR) or GUID Partition Table (GPT), file system, and directories. On some operating systems (like Unix or Unix-like) most hex editors can act as disk editors just opening block devices instead of regular files. Programmers can use disk editors to understand these structures and test whether their implementation (e.g. of a file system) works correctly. Sometimes these structures are edited in order to provide examples for teaching data recovery and forensics, or in an attempt to hide data to achieve privacy or hide data from casual examiners. However, modifying such data structures gives only a weak level of protection and data encryption is the preferred method to achieve privacy.
Some disk editors include special functions which enable more comfortable ways to edit and fix file systems or other disk specific data structures. Furthermore, some include simple file browsers that can present the disk contents for partially corrupted file systems or file systems unknown to the operating system. These features can be used for example for file recovery.
All 1980s disk editors strove to be better than DEBUG contained in DOS. DEBUG could load, edit, and write one or more sectors from a Floppy disk or hard disk based on the BIOS. This permitted simple disk editing tasks such as saving and restoring the master boot record and other critical sectors, or even changing the active (= boot) partition in the MBR.
In an NTVDM under 1993's Windows NT DEBUG could not access the physical drive with the MBR of the operating system and so was in essence useless as disk editor for the system drive. The Resource Kit and the support tools for some Windows NT versions contained DSKPROBE as a very simple disk editor supporting the use and modification of the partition table in the MBR and related tasks.
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