diskman
diskman is an interactive command-line interface for safely managing removable disks.
It can be seen as a wrapper around dd, fdisk, and mkfs.*.
These tools are all perfectly suitable for managing removable disks, and diskman does not attempt to wrap their interfaces. Instead, its purpose is simply to prevent you from accidentally picking the wrong disk. It should not sit well with anyone that the only difference between wiping a pen drive and a (SATA) system disk is the single character at the end of /dev/sd.
diskman lets you only pick from removable disks, and confirms before executing any destructive commands.
Installation
Install from rubygems.org.
gem install diskman
The binary is called diskman.
Usage
Usage:
diskman write <file>
diskman clone <file>
diskman fdisk
diskman mkfs [--list]
diskman choose (device | partition)
diskman ls
diskman --version
Options:
-v, --version Show version
Examples
write
Writes an image to the device.
In this example there is only one device so it has been auto-selected.
$ diskman write archlinux-2019.10.01-x86_64.iso
Found the following removable device.
1. /dev/sde [61G, SanDisk Ultra USB 3.0]
Press enter to select it.
File: archlinux-2019.10.01-x86_64.iso (657M)
Device: /dev/sde [61G, SanDisk Ultra USB 3.0]
Command: dd if="archlinux-2019.10.01-x86_64.iso" of="/dev/sde" bs=4M status=progress conv=fsync
Are you sure? Type "yes".
> yes
160511+2 records in
160511+2 records out
657457152 bytes (657 MB, 627 MiB) copied, 43.6238 s, 15.1 MB/s
clone
Clones a device to an image file.
$ diskman clone disk.img
Found the following removable device.
1. /dev/sdd [61G, SanDisk Ultra USB 3.0]
Press enter to select it.
File: disk.img
Device: /dev/sdd [61G, SanDisk Ultra USB 3.0]
Command: sudo dd if="/dev/sdd" of="disk.img" bs=4M status=progress conv=fsync
Are you sure? Type "yes"
> yes
15226+1 records in
15226+1 records out
63864569856 bytes (64 GB, 59 GiB) copied, 802.035 s, 79.6 MB/s
mkfs
Formats a device as a particular filesystem.
In this example (and the one following) there are two devices so the user has to pick one.
$ diskman mkfs
Choose from the following removable devices.
1. /dev/sde [61G, SanDisk Ultra USB 3.0]
2. /dev/sdf [2G, USB 2.0 USB Flash Drive]
Enter your selection.
> 1
Choose from the following devices.
1. /dev/sde
2. /dev/sde1
3. /dev/sde2
Enter your selection.
> 2
Choose from the following filesystems.
1. bfs
2. btrfs
3. cramfs
4. exfat
5. ext2
6. ext3
7. ext4
8. fat
9. minix
10. msdos
11. vfat
12. xfs
Enter your selection.
> 6
Filesystem: ext3
Device: /dev/sde1
Command: sudo mkfs.ext3 /dev/sde1
Are you sure? Type "yes".
> yes
mke2fs 1.45.4 (23-Sep-2019)
/dev/sde1 contains a iso9660 file system labelled 'CD'
Proceed anyway? (y,N) y
Creating filesystem with 160512 4k blocks and 40160 inodes
Filesystem UUID: 24b617af-43fe-4502-b554-9ba913795c61
Superblock backups stored on blocks:
32768, 98304
Allocating group tables: done
Writing inode tables: done
Creating journal (4096 blocks): done
Writing superblocks and filesystem accounting information: done
fdisk
Starts fdisk for the device.
$ diskman fdisk
Choose from the following removable devices.
1. /dev/sde [61G, SanDisk Ultra USB 3.0]
2. /dev/sdf [2G, USB 2.0 USB Flash Drive]
Enter your selection.
> 1
Welcome to fdisk (util-linux 2.34).
Changes will remain in memory only, until you decide to write them.
Be careful before using the write command.
Device does not contain a recognized partition table.
Created a new DOS disklabel with disk identifier 0x2736460c.
Command (m for help):
Contributions
Open an issue or send a pull request.