Hi there,

I have a USB thumb drive device (da0) and I wish to run an md5 sum on the device itself.

Is it possible to do this? or is there any other way to accomplish this task?

I need to verify the has of the device before and after making a dd bit copy.

TIA for any pointers.....

Niall.

You're not trying to MD5 the "device", you want the MD5 of the entire contents of the device, right? You could always write a find statement to crawl through the directory tree and MD5 everything, then compare the list of checksums. I also heard of a project call "md5deep" or "deepmd5" or something like that, which will actually do the crawl through the directories for you. I can't remember if it gave an MD5 of every file that it found, or just created an md5 on the directory and file tree.

Hi chort,

No, actually I want the device.

In linux, let's say you have a device attached, /dev/hda. You can issue the following command

And it will return an MD5 hash for the device.

Now, if you want to be sure you have a bit-image copy, you dd, then run the MD5 again on the dd'd file and be sure the two match.

That's what I'm trying to do.

Basically image a USB DRIVE in its entirety, and verify after I've imaged that I've actually got a forensically sound copy.

md5deep is a project by Jesse Kornblum that's a fairly neat little tool to recursivle do MD5 hashing. However, I want the device hashed at this stage, not the contents.

Am I being clear? if not, just ask!

Thanks

Niall.

P.S. I don't care if the hash is SHA, or CRC, or whatever, just so long as I can verify afterwards what it is I have done.

What error message do you get when you do the md5 hash against /dev/hda (or whetever device it is)??

Cheers--
Charles

Well i am not sure if i am getting the md5 of the file /dev/ad1 (i would assume so) but perhaps it is the drive? You can do as root 'md5 /dev/ad1'