Differences between Daemon Tools and Alcohol 120% MDF images

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markot
Posts: 23
Joined: Sat Mar 12, 2016 8:56 am

Differences between Daemon Tools and Alcohol 120% MDF images

Post by markot »

I tested last week to make MDF images using both Daemon Tools Lite and Alcohol 120%. If the MDF format is supposed to be a RAW format, shouldn't both of these programs make identical MDF files? The test results was that the file size was different using different programs.

koro.maki
Posts: 5
Joined: Sun May 28, 2017 8:41 am

Re: Differences between Daemon Tools and Alcohol 120% MDF im

Post by koro.maki »

well as I know the Media Descriptor File ( aka MDF ) is invented by Alcohol Soft Inc for Alcohol 120% so the format is not publicly documented and/or described so this is the result of my own analyzes.
It seems the creators of MDF, couldn't store bits in exact same order/shape from CD/DVD to HDD. so they don't exactly convert CD/DVD store algorithm into HDD. (or maybe they wanted to save space among conversion)
For this conversion they had to change data block size and other property of stored data and it will led them to place a header on top of it.

as I analyzed the headers is something like this
[total block]
[block size]
[data]
[extra block]
...
[finalizer]

Finally I think it is about default block size and alignment that make your files different.

TheDosProgrammer
Posts: 92
Joined: Tue Oct 18, 2016 7:03 pm
Location: Europe

Re: Differences between Daemon Tools and Alcohol 120% MDF im

Post by TheDosProgrammer »

But why do you want to use Daemon Tools? Isn't easier to get the free edition of Alcohol120% from mrpijey's signature? BA is using MDF format because it saves more data than other formats and if this is proprietary format it usually means that there's no documentation for encoding data into that format. It basically means that there can be differences between Daemon Tools and Alcohol120% MDF files.
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