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I have a 500GB hard drive that contains several NTFS partitions. I would like to create a single disk image of all partitions. My ultimate goal is to mount that drive later and scan it for possible file recovery.
I would like to know if there is a disk image file format that allow to "compress" the disk image (it would be smaller than the actual size of the drive) by only storing the sectors which are not empty. I only know about the ISO file format but AFAIK this is a raw copy of the disk. I could compress that image later (eg : using gz compression) but it would make the image unusable (non mountable) unless the actual image is fully uncompressed first.
I ask this because the used space of the drive is only about 80GB. If I open the disk using an tool (eg : HxD) I see that about almost all sectors beyond a certains point (about 65%) contains null bytes (those sectors are empty).
EDIT: I am on Windows 10.
2Any good hard drive imaging software does this by default. – Moab – 2019-10-31T19:36:35.397
@Moab : good to know. Does it work even if disk image format is ISO ? (if not what should I select ?). Will I still be able to mount the image afterwards ? – tigrou – 2019-10-31T20:00:29.810
They each have their own format. – Moab – 2019-10-31T21:12:32.063