Using the DD Linux Command To Backup & Restore

Background

I have been messing around with backing up a compact flash card and trying to put images onto an sd card for my Raspberry PI and thought I would jot down effective use of the Linux DD utility. The ‘dd’ command is one of the original Unix utilities and should be avaliable in all Linux distros. It can strip headers, extract parts of binary files and write into the middle of floppy disks; it is used by the Linux kernel Makefiles to make boot images. It can be used to copy and convert magnetic tape formats, convert between ASCII and EBCDIC, swap bytes, and force to upper and lowercase. Continue reading

Checking an MD5 Checksum Of A Downloaded File in Linux

MD5 is a one-way algorithm as defined by the RFC1321 that can be used to verify the integrity of a file or filesystem by providing as 128bit digital signature.  This digital signature is like a fingerprint for a file or filesystem and will change dramatically even if a single byte changes.

This means they are excellent in checking the integrity of a file that you have downloaded of a mirror that provides the files equivalent MD5Checksum.  Continue reading