Creating a File System "Driver"

I'm looking to create a "driver" I guess for a custom file system on physical disk for Windows. I don't exactly know the best way to explain it, but the device already has proper drivers and everything like that for Win开发者_如何学Cdows to communicate with it, but what I want to happen is for the user to be able to plug the device in to their PC, have it show up in My Computer, and give them full support for browsing the device.

I realize it's probably a little scary thinking about someone who doesn't know the basics of doing something like this even asking the question, but I already have classes and everything constructed for reading it within my own app... I just want everything to be more centralized and without more work from the end user. Does anyone have a good guide for creating a project like this?

The closest thing I know of to what I understand from your description is an installable file system, like the Ext2 installable file system that allows Windows computers to work with Linux originating ext2 (and to a certain degree ext3) filesystems.

Maybe that can serve as a starting point for your investigations.

As an alternative approach there's the Shell extension which is a lot less complicated than the IFS. The now-defunct GMail shell extension used that approach, and even though it's become nonfunctional due to changes in GMail, it can still serve as inspiration.

Your options are:

1. Create a kernel mode file system driver. 9-12 months of work for experienced developer.
2. Use a framework and do everything in user mode. A couple of weeks of work to get the prototype working. The only drawback of this approach is that it's slower, than kernel-mode driver. You can play with Dokan mentioned above, or you can use our Callback File System for commercial-grade development.

I think you need to look through the Windows Driver Kit documentation (and related subjects) to figure out exactly what you're looking to create.

If you're intending to rely on the drivers that already exist, i.e. you don't need to actually execute your code in kernel land to communicate with it, I would recommend you take a look at FUSE for windows Dokan

If you indeed need to run in kernel space, and communicate directly with the hardware, you probably want to download windows DDK (driver development kit). Keep in mind that drivers for communicating with a block device and filesystems are separated, and it sound like you're talking about the filesystem itself. I believe that anything you run in kernel space will not have access to the c++ runtime, which means you can only use a subset of c++ for kernel drivers.