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Tcll
Asked: 2015-07-30 10:16:43 +0800 CST

how do I image a drive to an uncompressed file?

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I swear every tutorial I see and every software I run across can't give you an exact image of your drive, it's either gzip-compressed, or it's in another format for some specific software.

I want to open the img in HxD to manually recover my data, so the image needs to be in the EXACT byte-order of the disk.

How can I do this??

why manual recovery over recovery software?

ChkDsk did quite a number on the filesystem, so much so that any mount or recovery gives you 0KB files in 300GB of data.

the data is still there, but nothing can find it.

hard-drive

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    If you're talking about something like https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Disk_cloning#Create_disk_image you see

    # dd if=/dev/sdX conv=sync,noerror bs=64K | gzip -c > /path/to/backup.img.gz

    Which is getting the data, passing it through gzip, and writing it to a file. Now, watch this:

    # dd if=/dev/sdX conv=sync,noerror bs=64K > /path/to/backup.img

    Cool, huh? No no, hold your applause.

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