Decimal or Hex

I have a personal pet hate of people who use decimal numbers when Hex number make far more sense. On an NTFS disk, the first MFT sector is very often 6,291,519. I cannot remember this number, but 0x60003F is actually very easy. It is made up of a disk partition starting sector of 0x3F, and a cluster size of 8 times the starting cluster of 0xc0000.

When analysing a disk many times sector number make far more sense in Hex than in decimal. Another example can be to determine the cluster size based on file start locations. with a series of start locations such as 512, 640, 1824, 2368 there is no clear patter, but the same numbers in hex are 0x200, 0x280, 0x720, 0x940 it will be a good guess that clusters are probably 0x20 sectors in length.

CnW Recovery software allows for both decinmal and hex to be used, and many menus have an option box to switch between the two. Although it may be easy at first, it is well worth getting used to thinking in Hex when working on disk contents and this helps even more when a complex number is actually made up of several sections. An example maybe a date which has 5 bits for seconds, 6 bits for minutes etc. A decimal number is pretty meaningless, but a hex number is much clearer - though ultimately it is best viewed as a binary number.

Think Hex. Many numbers make far more sense in hex when investigating a disk and computer data. Windows comes with a nice calculator that will flip between decimal and hex when required.

Old joke - There are only 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary, and those who don't.