Imaging SCSI hard disks

Ethan> On Wed, Sep 29, 2004 at 10:48:11PM -0400, Jerome H. Fine Ethan> wrote: Ethan> I have no idea how to do this with any version of Windows, but Ethan> UNIX/Linux/etc. have always given you access to the raw disk. Ethan> In my case, the relevant command would resemble something Ethan> like... Ethan> ATTACH RQ0: /dev/sda Ethan> (where 'sd' is the driver, and 'a' is the controller). Ethan> This works with any and all emulators since to UNIX, unlike Ethan> Windows, everything is a file. "Devices" are not special Ethan> entities to open()/close() calls, etc. It's not quite that simple. Most Unices (though not Linux) have two ways to look at disks, the regular "block" device, and a "character"[sic] also called "raw". To do raw disk access you have to use the raw device. Second, the application may need to know the size of the disk. With a file that's easy: seek to the end, and ask for the position. While devices are "files", the seek and position technique doesn't work there, at least not on Linux when I was digging into this some years ago. You *can* usually find out how big a device is, but the means are specific to each flavor of the OS. paul