Ordering and Delivery

I have not received my license key.

If you don't receive your key in 24 hours, please use our online form to contact us. Make sure your email address specified correctly.

I have not received my package yet...

Our programs are distributed in electronic form only. In order to install a program please go to the download page and click the download link. When the installation file is downloaded, run it to complete the installation process.

I don't have a credit card...

You can pay by check or wire transfer. Please start your order as if paying by credit card - on the page you enter your name and address select "By check or wire" and follow the instructions on the next screen.

Do I need to purchase a second copy for my laptop?

This depends on the type of your license. Corporate License allows using the software on a desktop and a notebook computer as long as you are the only person using it. The discounted licenses, that is Home and Academic ones, allow single-computer installations only.

Technical Questions

FlexHEX reports wrong physical drive size...

Windows NT and 2000 assume any physical drive has 512 bytes per sector, 63 sectors per track, and 255 tracks per cylinder. If the drive has a different geometry or no geometry at all (like USB flash drives), the Windows returns the closest value, so the error may be as large as 8 Mb.

Windows XP introduced a new function that returns the true drive size in addition to the geometry parameters, so FlexHEX reports the correct physical drive size on Windows XP/2003.

I saved a sparse file, and the sparse areas were converted to real zeros...

FlexHEX allows creating sparse zero areas of any size, however the system may change the layout. If a sparse area or its part fits into the file buffer, it will be converted to real zeros. The size of the real data block is always rounded to some boundary which may be as large as 64k.

As soon as the file is saved, FlexHEX re-reads the actual region layout and updates its edit window and the Region pane accordingly.

My NTFS partition is shown as 'Win95 Extended' in the Partition Table view...

A partition will be marked as NTFS only when it is a primary partition. In your case it is an extended partition containing an NTFS-formatted logical drive.

FlexHEX reports an error when saving a Linux file...

You are probably using the EXT2IFS driver by John Newbigin. That driver contains a bug that permits opening a file for writing even if the driver is, in fact, a read-only one. As a result any attempt to save the modified file fails.

In order to avoid getting this error don't modify Linux files, or (better) open them in the read-only mode.

I could not open a dll/exe file...

Actually you can open an executable file while it is being executed - it is just you can't edit it. The system won't allow opening such a file for read/write access. It is simply not possible to modify a running executable aside from directly modifying the file's sectors.

In order to edit a running dll/exe file, either terminate the executable and reopen the file for read/write access, or select the File / Save As menu command to create a copy of the file.

Starting with version 2.2, FlexHEX lets you edit locked files, including executables being run. There are several problems though; read the article Lock Picking: Accessing A Locked File for a detailed discussion.

I could not open a network drive...
Network drives are not shown in the logical drive list...

Windows does not allow accessing a drive over the network. What you can access is an object called network share, which can represent a drive, a directory, or even some non-filesystem object like printer. However even if a share represents a drive, it is not possible to obtain a raw, non-file-based access to it.

Mapping a share to a drive letter does not change the situation. The drive letter in this case is just a symbolic name, and does not represent a real drive. The same is true for "drives", created by the subst command - you can access files there, but you can't open the drive itself because it is not really a drive.

FlexHEX reports a read error at the end of a flash card...

Some flash card readers have a bug in their control logic, reporting the card size 512 bytes larger than the actual size. As a result, FlexHEX reports an error when it attempts to access the non-existing area at the end of the card.

This error usually remains unnoticed because FAT32 clusters are always larger than 512 bytes, and the small 512-byte long tail remains unallocated during card formatting. Note also that you can see this error on Windows XP and later systems only. Windows NT and 2000 report a card size incorrectly (see above), thus compensating for the control logic bug.

It is hard to tell how many card readers have that bug (at least some USB 1.1 ones do). In any case nothing can be done about it - just ignore the error.