[arch-general] Clone a block device using 'cat'

[Foxtrot Mike]

Note: This is not an Arch related question. I tried asking this question elsewhere, but didnt get any useful response. In the past I have received very helpful responses on this mail list so I am posting this here in the hope that someone would be willing/able to help me out.

Hi,

I am able to telnet into a router that's running a customized linux firmware. It was compiled using 'buildroot'.

I was able to dig out some specs of the router. I intend to clone the router's firmware for further study. 'dd' is not available so I tried using cat to throw the entire contents of the flash drive (mtdblock0) to my pc using netcat:

Router:
    cat /dev/mtdblock0 | nc ip port

PC:
    nc -lp port > routerFirmware

Then on my PC I used 'binwalk' to examine the downloaded file. The result is:

DECIMAL       HEXADECIMAL     DESCRIPTION
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
0             0x0             Squashfs filesystem, little endian, non-standard signature, version 4.0, compression:gzip, size: xxxxxxx bytes, xxx inodes, blocksize: xxxxxx bytes, created: xxxx-xx-xx xx:xx:xx

Seems good so far. But '# unsquash routerFlash' results in:

    Can't find a SQUASHFS superblock on routerFlash

The most probable reason I think is that 'cat' and 'nc' are not able to clone the entire flash as I intend. I am stuck here. Any help would be appreciated!

Regards.