And one more thing, if during AV scan if a file can't be opened due to
some processes LOCKING the file.... Instead of going through the
regular file open process AV should instead directly read the SECTORS
of the hdd
This might seem to be a bright idea at first, however, there are problems
with this approach. For one, the AV system would have to interpret the
filesystem on its own. Since NTFS is not documented and pretty
complicated,
this is an error-prone task and I have no confidence AV vendors might be
able to master it correctly. Then, even if you are able to read sectors (a
non-trivial task under Windows as well), a file is usually not locked
without reason - it will likely undergo some changes even *during the
scan*
so the results will be mostly useless. What you'd use instead is the
Volume
Shadow Copy (aka Snapshot) feature as done with various backup
applications.