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Imaging Drives (Conceptual: dd, FTK Imager)

Cyber Security Mastery: From Zero to Hero

Preserving the Data

To ensure the original hard drive is never modified, forensic examiners create a perfect, bit-by-bit copy, or forensic image, of the disk.

Write Blockers

Before imaging, a hardware or software write blocker is used to ensure the forensic workstation cannot accidentally write data back to the original evidence drive, preserving its integrity.

Imaging Tools

  1. dd (Disk Dump): A powerful, native Linux command used to create raw forensic images. bash

    Example to copy disk /dev/sda to image.dd

    dd if=/dev/sda of=/mnt/evidence/image.dd bs=4M status=progress

  2. FTK Imager (Forensic Toolkit Imager): A popular free tool on Windows that creates forensic images in common formats (like E01) and automatically calculates cryptographic hashes during the acquisition process.