Powerful disk editor for Linux like Acronis Disk Editor

Question

I would like to have a powerful Linux-based disk viewer / editor (raw hex editor) like Acronis Disk Editor. It should show the absolute sector, cylinder, head and relative sector for the part you are looking at, and you can search and go to positions, etc.

Here is a picture:

Answer 1

I would recommend Active@ Disk Editor as it is freeware Windows and Linux and in my opinion a better all around tool then Acronis due to many useful features. It meets most of your requirements along with some very useful features without being cluttered. Very similar to Acronis Disk Editor it is a powerful hard drive raw hex editor which shows your current sector and offset as well as having the ability to goto any location on the disk and find locations by searching for ANSI, Hex, or Unicode strings.

Active@ Disk Editor uses a simple, low-level disk viewer which displays information in binary and text modes at the same time

It also supports location bookmarks, drive and partition table formatted data templates to format data as well as tools for recognizing partition tables, MBR, file headers and much more.

I am no way affiliated with any company, I was just looking for a similar tool and found this along with your question during my search.

Here is information from the Company:

Active@ Disk Editor is a freeware advanced tool for viewing & editing raw sectors on Physical Disks, Partitions & Files content in hexadecimal form.

http://www.disk-editor.org

Software features:

Enhanced template view FAT, NTFS, UFS, HFS+, ExtFs templates (iNodes,SuperBlocks)
Detailed MFT record information
Side-by-side Compare and Edit
Fields coloring with data in tooltips
Extensive exFAT support
Fast navigation points
Filling selection with a pattern
Unicode support
Quick Disk Info
Bookmarks
Data Inspector
Hyperlinks for MFT records
Advanced search using RegExp & wildcards
Open and work with raw & compressed disk images
Command line support
More templates supported (HFS+, Linux)

Answer 2

This is probably the tool you need: http://www.wxhexeditor.org/home.php, just use sudo apt-get install wxhexeditor

Well, I guess, you could also use dd and hexdump in some form. If you use SATA, you would look for /dev/sdX for NVMe drives that would be /dev/nvme0n1p3 like this:

sudo dd if=/dev/nvme0n1p3 bs=1k count=1 | hexdump -C 1+0 records in 1+0 records out 1024 bytes (1.0 kB, 1.0 KiB) copied, 2.4685e-05 s, 41.5 MB/s 00000000 4c 55 4b 53 ba be 00 01 61 65 73 00 00 00 00 00 |LUKS....aes.....| 00000010 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |................| 00000020 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 78 74 73 2d 70 6c 61 69 |........xts-plai| 00000030 6e 36 34 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |n64.............| 00000040 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 73 68 61 32 35 36 00 00 |........sha256..| 00000050 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |................| 00000060 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 10 00 00 00 00 40 |...............@| 00000070 a4 95 e1 f5 c9 ee d0 30 6c 4e 37 f2 fb af a4 2a |.......0lN7....*| 00000080 14 f9 89 0b b5 89 14 a5 76 c4 5a af a0 2f 3e 64 |........v.Z../>d| 00000090 10 82 4c f6 3c 01 b3 c6 11 ff 5f 37 e4 46 8b 88 |..L.<....._3.F..| 000000a0 f5 7c 83 6e 00 03 08 5e 36 64 65 31 61 62 39 34 |.|.n...^6de1ab94| 000000b0 2d 61 35 34 64 2d 34 32 66 30 2d 39 32 64 31 2d |-a54d-42f0-12d1-| 000000c0 65 65 66 62 62 63 32 30 63 61 38 66 00 00 00 00 |eefbbc20ca8f....| 000000d0 00 ac 71 f3 00 18 43 2c 62 fd 14 d0 fe 8c ac e0 |..q...H,b.......| 000000e0 b7 18 02 d3 40 30 dd c7 2f 50 1a af 1c 75 05 ed |....@0../P...u..| 000000f0 9b 60 f9 7d c2 e7 d1 1e 00 00 00 08 00 00 0f a0 |.`.}............| 00000100 00 00 de ad 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |................| 00000110 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |................| 00000120 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 02 00 00 00 0f a0 |................| 00000130 00 00 de ad 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |................| 00000140 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |................| 00000150 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 03 f8 00 00 0f a0 |................| 00000160 00 00 de ad 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |................| 00000170 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |................| 00000180 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 05 f0 00 00 0f a0 |................| 00000190 00 00 de ad 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |................| 000001a0 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |................| 000001b0 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 07 e8 00 00 0f a0 |................| 000001c0 00 00 de ad 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |................| 000001d0 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |................| 000001e0 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 09 e0 00 00 0f a0 |................| 000001f0 00 00 de ad 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |................| 00000200 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |................| 00000210 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 0b d8 00 00 0f a0 |................| 00000220 00 00 de ad 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |................| 00000230 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |................| 00000240 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 0d d0 00 00 0f a0 |................| 00000250 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |................| * 00000400

You could also use any hex editor, like vim (xxd) or emacs (hexl-mode) For vim this would be: :%!xxd to switch into hex mode :%!xxd -r to exit from hex mode Please consult this different answer: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5498197/need-a-good-hex-editor-for-linux You can also refer to vim wiki for the editing part: http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Hex_dump

So I would do something like this: sudo dd if=/dev/nvme0n1p3 seek=<NUMBER OF BS BLOCKS TO SKIP> bs=1k count=1 | vim -b -

This is probably not very convenient, but it works almost on any UNIX-like system for the last about 20 years at least.