Design And Implementation Of Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) Based Hard Disk Data Protection Solution

Accompanying with the wider application of computers, data stored in computers' storage devices has exploded. Hard disk is widely used as a mass storage device, providing ability of rapid random access. Making use of the physical property of magnetic medium, hard disk provides nonvolatile and relative safe storage for data. The safety of data stored in hard disk, however, is highly threatened by computer viruses, hackers' attacks, users' misoperations and etc all the time. To resolve this problem, various kinds of technology and products to protect data come out. The most typical one is to backup the data so that it can be recovered when being ruined in future.In this article, I present a new solution for protecting home user's data in hard disk, which combines software and firmware by employing the Extensible Firmware Interface. This solution addresses many problems of traditional methods, such as platform dependency, function monotony and lack of extensibility. The core function of this solution bases on hard disk block redirection. It protects data in HD by Windows driver. End user can create hard disk snapshot when necessary, which can be recovered when the data is ruined in future. Snapshot recovery can be initiated in OS or EFI/BIOS phase in case that OS can't be booted.Some basic knowledge is briefed at first, such as data protection theory, existing hard disk data protection solutions, Windows driver framework and EFI framework. Afterwards the application models, module design, data structure design, algorithm design and key points of EFI module implantation are detailed in this article. At the end, the possible improvements and future work are issued.