First of all, I don't need a textual comparison so Beyond Compare doesn't do what I need.
I'm looking for a util that can report on the differences between two files, at the byte level. Bare minimum is the need to see the percentage change in the file, or a report on affected bytes/sectors.
Is there anything available to save me the trouble of doing this myself?
I guess it depends on what exactly is contained in the file, but here's a quick one:
Since 16 bytes are typically reported on each line, this won't technically give you a count of the bytes changed, but will give you a rough idea where in the file changes have occurred.
ECMerge recently introduced a binary differ, it can compare files of several giga bytes (the limit is somewhere above the tera byte). it works on linux, windows, mac os x and solaris. it gives you byte by byte or block per block statistics.
You can parameter synchronization window (if desired) and minimal match.
UltraCompare is the best for binary comparison. It has a smart comparator that is really useful.
There's Araxis Merge available for windows. Here's a page that describes their binary comparison feature.
I found VBinDiff. I haven't used it, but it probably does what you want.
You can use xdelta. This is open source binary diff tool that you can use then to make binary patches, but I think it also gives the information about differences found.