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Disk images

There are various types of disk image formats. For clarity the formats are divided by means of their original purpose, e.g. were they intended to be used in (disk) forensics or virtualization.

Disk images are usually block by block copies of the original data source. Depending on the data source, the blocks can be bytes, sectors, clusters, pages or similar. The disk image format may be further enhanced with additional information, such as error detection, error correction, data digest (hash, and compression.

Forensics Disk Image formats

Forensics File Formats

Virtualization Disk Image formats

Other Disk Image formats

Mac OS X has support for various disk image types build-in, some of which are:

Windows