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Revision as of 11:02, 13 December 2012 by Gregfreemyer (Talk | contribs)

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Maintainer: Paul Rubin, David MacKenzie, Stuart Kemp
OS: Linux,Windows,Mac OS X
Genre: Disk imaging
License: GPL
Website: ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/

dd, sometimes called GNU dd, is the oldest imaging tool still used. Although it is functional and requires only minimal resources to run, it lacks some of the useful features found in more modern imagers such as metadata gathering, error correction, piecewise hashing, and a user-friendly interface. dd is a command line program that uses several obscure command line arguments to control the imaging process. Because some of these flags are similar and, if confused, can destroy the source media the examiner is trying to duplicate, users should be careful when running this program. The program generates raw image files which can be read by many other programs.

dd is part of the GNU Coreutils package which in turn has been ported to many operating systems.

There are a few forks of dd for forensic purposes including dcfldd, sdd, dd_rescue, ddrescue, dccidd, and a Microsoft Windows version that supports reading physical memory.



Here are two common dd command lines:




dd.exe if=\\.\PhysicalDrive0 of=d:\images\PhysicalDrive0.img --md5sum --verifymd5


With linux in addition to


You can wipe a drive with:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=4K conv=noerror,sync

For imaging a useful alternate invocation in Linux or UNIX is:

dd if=/def/hda bs=4K conv=sync,noerror | tee mybigfile.img | md5sum > mybigfile.md5

The above alternate imaging command uses dd to read the harddrive being imaged and outputs the data to tee. tee saves a copy of the data as your image file and also outputs a copy of the data to md5sum. md5sum calculates the hash which gets saved in mybgifile.md5

For all of the above

if             => input file
/dev/hda       => the linux name of a physical disk.  Mac has their own names.
/dev/zero      => in linux, this is an infinite source of nulls
of             => output file
mybigfile.img  => The name of the image file you are creating
bs             => blocksize
65536          => 64K  (I normally use 4K in linux.  That is what the linux kernel uses as a page size.)
noerror        => don't die if you have a read error from the source drive
sync           => if there is an error, null fill the rest of the block.

In linux, the blocksize value can have a multiplicative suffix:

c =1
w =2
b =512
kB =1000,           K =1024
MB =1000*1000,      M =1024*1024
GB =1000*1000*1000, G =1024*1024*1024

Things to know:

Having a bigger blocksize is more efficient, but if you use a 1MB block as an example and have a read error in the first sector, then dd will null fill the entire MB. Thus you should use as small a blocksize as feasible.

But with linux if you go below 4KB blocksize, you can hit really bad performance issues. It can be as much as 10x slower to use the default 512 byte block as it is to use a 4KB block.

Without noerror and sync, you basically don't have a forensic image. For forensic images they are mandatory.

dd by itself does not hash, that is why the alternate command is provided.



See also

External Links