How to view sectors of unformatted hard disk

writedom · 05-25-2008, 09:54 PM

I want to view the sectors of my hard disk after it has been "wiped". I have programs to do this in windows, but how about Linux?

I am using Ubuntu 8.04 if that makes a difference.

Thanks

pinniped · 05-25-2008, 10:25 PM

I'm not sure what you want to do - attempt to view inodes and content in hex+ascii or find out what can be recovered.

You can use any of the usual recovery tools to report on what can be found and what they believe can be recovered. For example, look at 'magicrescue'.

writedom · 05-25-2008, 10:31 PM

I want to display hard-disk data by physical sectors in hex & ascii.

pixellany · 05-25-2008, 11:07 PM

You need the "dd" command.

Example: For a disk which has been "wiped", there are no partitions. Assume that the drive is /dev/sda. To read the first 50 sectors, you could do:

dd if=/dev/sda bs=512 count=50 | hexdump -C | more

syg00 · 05-25-2008, 11:08 PM

I just use dd and pipe it to something like xxd.
There may be a GUI'fied option for Linux but I've never bothered looking.

Edit: d'oh

writedom · 05-26-2008, 09:15 AM

That's what I needed.

Thank You