Forensic image

Imaging of a hard drive is the process of creating an exact forensic image of the victim or the suspect hard drive in order to conduct the analysis on the imaged hard drive instead of the original one. To create an exact copy of the hard drive, there are two options that can be followed:

• Duplication: This is where the destination of this process is the whole hard drive. In some references, this step can be addressed as cloning when the destination hard drive has the same brand, model, and size of the source hard drive. Duplication can be conducted using what are called forensic hardware duplicators. These are hardware devices, which basically have two interfaces for the source and the destination hard drives. Once they start operating, they will just copy blocks of data from the source to the destination regardless of the structure of the filesystem that is used in the source hard drive.

  Usually, hardware duplication is faster than other software tools as it operates in wire...