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A disk image is a snapshot of a storage device's structure and data typically stored in one or more computer files on another storage device. [1] [2]Traditionally, disk images were bit-by-bit copies of every sector on a hard disk often created for digital forensic purposes, but it is now common to only copy allocated data to reduce storage space.
One of the main characteristics of qcow disk images is that files with this format can grow as data is added. This allows for smaller file sizes than raw disk images, which allocate the whole image space to a file, even if parts of it are empty. This is particularly useful for file systems that do not support sparse files, such as FAT32. [5]
The file size of a raw disk image is always a multiple of the sector size. For floppy disks and hard drives this size is typically 512 bytes (but other sizes such as 128 and 1024 exist). More precisely, the file size of a raw disk image of a magnetic disk corresponds to: Cylinders × Heads × (Sectors per track) × (Sector size)
An Apple Disk Image can be structured according to one of several proprietary disk image formats, including the Universal Disk Image Format (UDIF) from Mac OS X and the New Disk Image Format (NDIF) from Mac OS 9. An Apple disk image file's name usually has ".dmg" as its extension. A disk image is a compressed copy of the contents of a disk or ...
Since Windows Vista, [14] Windows can boot from a WIM disk image file, for which the file format is published; [15] it is similar to the ZIP format except that it supports hard links, deduplicated chunks, and uses chunk-by-chunk compression. In this case, the whole WIM is initially loaded into RAM, followed by the kernel initialisation.
A bootable device can be storage devices like floppy disk, CD-ROM, USB flash drive, a partition on a hard disk (where a hard disk stores multiple OS, e.g Windows and Fedora), a storage device on local network, etc. [7] A hard disk to boot Linux stores the Master Boot Record (MBR), which contains the first-stage/primary bootloader in order to be ...
Due to the use of single-instance storage, the more each successive disk image has in common with previous images added to the WIM file, the less new data will be added. A WIM can also be split (spanned) into multiple parts, which have the .swm extension. WIM images can be made bootable and Windows boot loader supports booting Windows from a ...
Pages in category "Disk images" ... Amiga Disk File; Apple Disk Image; Archive file; B. Boot image; C. Comparison of disc image software; D. Direct Access Archive; K ...