acquiring-disk-image-with-dd-and-dcfldd

acquiring-disk-image-with-dd-and-dcfldd is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from xalgorix/xalgorix. It costs 38 tokens per session (2,807 once invoked), scanned B, a copy of acquiring-disk-image-with-dd-and-dcfldd, Apache-2.0.

A guide to creating verified, bit-for-bit copies of hard drives, USB devices, and memory cards with dd or dcfldd. Hashes are used to check that the copy matches the source.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it before forensic analysis, during incident response, or when an investigation requires a defensible copy of storage media.
Why use it?
It preserves the original storage device for investigation and provides evidence that the working copy was not changed during acquisition.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one. Also seen: positional $N argument.

Good fit Use it before forensic analysis, during incident response, or when an investigation requires a defensible copy of storage media.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/xalgorix/xalgorix/acquiring-disk-image-with-dd-and-dcfldd
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add xalgorix/xalgorix --skill acquiring-disk-image-with-dd-and-dcfldd
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/xalgorix/xalgorix

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for acquiring-disk-image-with-dd-and-dcfldd

README.md
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Your own site
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Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

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Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/xalgorix/xalgorix/acquiring-disk-image-with-dd-and-dcfldd"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/xalgorix/xalgorix/acquiring-disk-image-with-dd-and-dcfldd.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 38 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,807 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan B 1 finding. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin 77% copy Near-identical to another mod in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00038 $0.02807
Opus 5 $0.00019 $0.01404
Sonnet 5 $0.00008 $0.00561
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00281

Measured 8d ago against content hash 104a73755290, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade B, and why

acquiring-disk-image-with-dd-and-dcfldd scanned grade B with 1 finding against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 8d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Asks for rootmediumPrivilege escalation

A mod that escalates privileges can change anything on the machine, not only the project.

- Root/sudo privileges on the forensic workstation
Origin

This is a copy

77% identical to acquiring-disk-image-with-dd-and-dcfldd — 19 lines differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.

internal/tools/skills/data/digital-forensics/acquiring-disk-image-with-dd-and-dcfldd/SKILL.md · 251 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 251 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Acquiring Disk Image with dd and dcfldd

When to Use

  • When you need to create a forensic copy of a suspect drive for investigation
  • During incident response when preserving volatile disk evidence before analysis
  • When law enforcement or legal proceedings require a verified bit-for-bit copy
  • Before performing any destructive analysis on a storage device
  • When acquiring images from physical drives, USB devices, or memory cards

Detection Gaps & Validation

  • Hidden areas a naive dd silently drops: an HPA or DCO makes the disk report fewer sectors than it physically has, so dd if=/dev/sdb captures less than the full media. Check hdparm -N /dev/sdb (HPA) and hdparm --dco-identify /dev/sdb (DCO) and compare against the label / smartctl -i native capacity before imaging; document or remove the HPA per policy.
  • conv=noerror,sync masks bad sectors: zero-padding keeps offsets aligned but the gaps then look like real null data. Always read dcfldd's errlog (or a ddrescue mapfile) and record every unreadable LBA - never present a padded region as recovered content.
  • Hash mismatch is not automatically tampering: a source-vs-image mismatch most often means a missing write-blocker, a failing disk remapping sectors, or a volume that auto-mounted/fsck'd during read. Compare source_hash_before vs source_hash_after; if the source changed, the imaging chain is at fault, not the suspect.
  • Validate independently: confirm with a second tool and a second algorithm (compute SHA-256 and MD5, or re-image with ewfacquire) and verify dcfldd's per-window hashwindow hashes match a fresh sha256sum pass over the image.
  • Interpretation pitfalls (false positives): USB bridge/adapter capacity clipping, .gz compression hiding read errors, and live-system imaging where mounted-volume timestamps mutate mid-read. Record block size, write-blocker model, and tool version so a reviewer can reproduce the exact hash.

Prerequisites

  • Linux-based forensic workstation (SIFT, Kali, or any Linux distro)
  • dd (pre-installed on all Linux systems) or dcfldd (enhanced forensic version)
  • Write-blocker hardware or software write-blocking configured
  • Destination drive with sufficient storage (larger than source)
  • Root/sudo privileges on the forensic workstation
  • SHA-256 or MD5 hashing utilities (sha256sum, md5sum)

Read the full file on GitHub · 251 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 8d ago First seen · 251 lines · 38 tokens per session scan B 104a73755290

Subscribe to this mod's changes

acquiring-disk-image-with-dd-and-dcfldd is a skill published in the GitHub repository xalgorix/xalgorix (972 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 38 tokens to every session and 2,807 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it B with 1 finding (asks for root). It is 77% identical to acquiring-disk-image-with-dd-and-dcfldd, differing in 19 lines, and is treated as a copy.

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