Does anyone know of an easy way to prepare a raw disk image to be accessible across platforms?
Sometimes I do data transfers for people and there are times when I just want to supply an image of the whole disk to the person just in case there is something missed in the transfer.
I was thinking of using clonezilla to create a raw image and then some how converting that to some kind of readable file container.
If the user is technically proficient, a full disk image can be opened using the right tool. For example, an image made using dd can be mounted under Linux. Certainly, supplying the user with a disk image is good service, because it allows you to go back and recover data that might have been missed, even if the user cannot access it, and I commend you for wanting to provide it!
However: an exact image of a disk would contain each partition in its own file system (FS). For example, the Linux partition is likely using the ext4 FS, which is not natively accessible from Windows (likely using NTFS). Though there are third-party tools for Windows users to access ext4 partitions, those I've tried have left some things to be desired.
In summary, if the drive is from the user's own PC, a disk image made with dd should be readable by them, or you could use other imaging software, such as Macrium Reflect, which runs on Windows and from a Rescue Environment on USB, to make the image, which can then be mounted using Reflect on the user's Windows OS PC. However, if the drive is from a different user, then the image might not be directly useful.
