Understanding Windows Internals - recommended books?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Carl Farrington
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Carl Farrington

I've come across some things lately that I would like to have known.

Windows:
I wanted to know if ftdisk.sys was required and actively used in a regular
desktop install of Windows XP Pro. I had up until now thought that
ftdisk.sys was only for Fault Tolerant volumes - software stripes and mirror
sets created by Windows, although I knew the service was always running. I
eventually discovered, (through a Microsoft Word document relating to
embedded Windows XP) that ftdisk.sys is now the partition manager for *all*
basic disk layouts, where dmio.sys is for Dynamic disks. I'd like to have
known this, it was difficult to find out for sure.

Internet Explorer:
With today's browsers being heavily altered by adware/spyware etc I would
like to know more about the way Browser Helpers and Browser Plug-ins are
installed - where in the registry they are installed (of course I could find
this out by looking at the results of a HiJackThis scan), and also how they
execute - are all these things executed when a browser is opened, are some
only executed when a certain mime-type is encountered etc.

I would like a better understanding of what is going on, can anybody
recommend some good bedtime reading?
 
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