Creating a dump from physical media

Table of Contents Command description Command usage Example Operating system support

Command description

This operating will create a dump image from real media using a physical device. It will retry errors and when finished create an XML metadata sidecar and an Alcohol 120% media descriptor for optical media. The dumping operation can be interrupted and continued later, even with a different device.

Command usage

DiscImageChef dump-media -d [true/false] -e <encoding> -f [true/false] -i <device path> -k <sectors> --lead-in [true/false] -m [true/false] --no-metadata [true/false] --no-trim [true/false] -O <options> -o <filename> --persistent [true/false] -p <passes> -s [true/false] -t <plugin> -v [true/false] -x <xml sidecar>

-d, --debug=[true/false] shows debug output (default false)
-e, --encoding=<encoding> character encoding to use when creating dump sidecar
-f, --force=[true/false] continuing dumping whatever happens (default false)
-i, --input=<device path> path to the physical device
-k, --skip=<sectors> skip this many sectors when an unreadable sector is found (default 512)
--lead-in=[true/false] try to dump Lead-in. Only applicable to CD, DDCD or GD media (default false)
-m, --resume=[true/false] create and/or use resume mapfile (default true)
--no-metadata=[true/false] disables creating CICM XML sidecar (default false)
--no-trim=[true/false] disables trimming errores from skipped sectors (default false)
-O, --options=<options> comma separated name=value pairs of options to pass to output image plugin
-o, --output=<filename> output image filename
--persistent=[true/false] try to recover partial or incorrect data (default false)
-p, --retry-passes=<passes> how many times to retry reading a sector (default 5)
-s, --stop-on-error=[true/false] stops dumping on first error (default false)
-t, --format=<plugin> format for the output image, as plugin name or plugin id. If not present, will try to detect it from output image extension
-v, --verbose=[true/false] shows verbose output (default false)
-x, --cicm-xml=<xml sidecar> take metadata from existing CICM XML sidecar

Example

FreeBSD: DiscImageChef dump-media -i /dev/cd0 -f --persistent=true --separate-subchannel -w mydisc
Linux: DiscImageChef dump-media -i /dev/sdb -r -f -p 15 -w myusbfloppy
Windows: DiscImageChef dump-media -i \\.\PhysicalDrive3 -f -p 0 --resume=false mydisk

Operating system support

Device type	FreeBSD	macOS	Linux	Windows
SCSI Block device	Yes	No [1]	Yes	Yes
SCSI MultiMedia device	Yes	Not yet [2]	Yes	Yes
SCSI Streaming device	Yes	No [1]	Yes	Yes
Parallel ATA	No [3]	No [1]	Yes	Yes
Serial ATA	Yes	No [1]	Yes	Yes
USB	Partial [4]	Partial [5]	Yes	Yes
FireWire	Partial [6]	Partial [5]	Yes	Partial [6]
PCMCIA	Partial [7]	Partial [5]	Yes	Partial [7]
SecureDigital / MultiMediaCard	Not yet [8]	No [1]	Yes	Untested [9]

1. a b c d e macOS only allows talking with MultiMedia devices
2. ^ Support for MultiMedia devices in macOS will be added if users require it
3. ^ Not supported due to upstream bug
4. ^ USB descriptors are not retrieved
5. a b c Only MultiMedia devices can be supported and descriptors will not be retrieved
6. a b FireWire descriptors are not retrieved
7. a b PCMCIA CIS is not retrieved
8. ^ Support will come with FreeBSD 12-RELEASE
9. ^ Should work, untested due to not available hardware