how to byte compare 2 hard drives

[restino]

hello,

can someone help me figure out how to byte compare 2 hard drives against each other.

i need to know the commands to compare all files in every directory against each other?

and then byte by byte on the entire drive?


is this possible?

thanks

[meton_magis]

uh, you could do
diff /dev/sda /dev/sdb
but I immagine that would be pretty unreadable, even if it worked. another option would be to cd to the root of a drive (wherever it is mounted) and run

tree > /temp/file

cd to the other drive's root

tree > /temp/file2
diff /temp/file /temp/file2

but this will just tell you if there are any files that are on one and not the other, not what is IN the file. For a byte by byte comparison, you would need to diff files together, not drives.