I wanted to make an exact image of a complete disk. It's a laptop hard drive that was attached to my PC via SATA-to-USB converter cable. I opened the disk with HxD (read only) and had HxD calculate the md5 hash. Then I used dd for Windows to make a complete copy of the disk to a file on another disk. I used HxD to calculate the md5 hash on the image file, and the hashes did not match.
Can anyone tell me if the disk is being changed somehow even though I'm opening in HxD as read only? Might Windows be changing the disk somehow during the md5 calculation (on a 120GB disk it took about six hours)? Anyone know the technical details of what Windows does to disk data when mounted and/or while it's mounted and/or when it's unmounted?
what happens when usng open disk feature
Re: what happens when usng open disk feature
Are the disks the same size in dd and HxD (the amount of sectors matter)?