Re: DiskEdit

From: Jules (julesrichardsonuk_at_remove.this.yahoo.co.uk)
Date: 02/03/05 

Date: Thu, 03 Feb 2005 14:39:14 +0000

On Wed, 02 Feb 2005 23:01:34 -0600, PhWashington wrote:

> Is there a tool that is equivalent to DiskEdit or WinHex for Linux?
>
> I've recently gotten interested in looking at raw data on harddrives and
> trying to understand what it all means. Where would I go to look for
> information that explains the equivalent of FAT on Linux partitions or
> the various formats.

I'd use dd to create a copy of the relevant disk blocks to a file, then
I've been using ghex2 for editing, and then dd to copy the data back to
the raw disk if needs be. I don't like editing on the raw disk just in
case if disaster :-)

eg. dd if=/dev/sda of=/tmp/output.bin count=10

... to read ten disk blocks from /dev/sda (first SCSI disk) to a file
/tmp/output.bin (look at the skip parameter too)

ghex2 is pretty good for editing binary files, displaying current byte /
short / word in decimal at the bottom of the screen, plus allowing you to
toggle between little endian and big endian modes. The only infuriating
thing about it (at least the verion I have) is that there's no way of
controlling how many columns it displays - I'd like it to do 16 and it
insists on giving me 18 on this machine (I think it works it out via
preferred font size)

Oh, I'm running KDE so I use KCalc quite a bit too as it allows
calculations and conversions in/between hex, decimal, octal etc. (I expect
there's a Gnome equivalent)

'hexdump -C' is quite useful for looking at binary data.

> Where would I go to look for
> information that explains the equivalent of FAT on Linux partitions or
> the various formats.

kernel source - as it'll contain declarations (and helpful hints) for all
sorts of disk-based structures:

/usr/src/linux/fs/...
/usr/src/linux/Documentation/filesystems/...

Have fun, and don't break anything ;)

cheers

Jules

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