Question: Is there any way I can view contents of hard drive in hex or binary? I’m currently using debian

Answer: Yes, you can open any block device as a file. As a matter of fact, the philosophy of Linux is everything is a file.

The block device you want to access is likely /dev/hda or /dev/sda. Since it is a very big file, I suggest you use wxHexEditor:

wxHexEditor /dev/sda

From the website:

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wxHexEditor is not an ordinary hex editor, but could work as low level ?disk editor too. If you have problems with your HDD or partition, you ?can recover your data from HDD or from partition via editing sectors ?in raw hex.

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You can edit your partition tables or you could recover ?files from File System by hand with help of wxHexEditor. Or you might ?want to analyze your big binary files, partitions, devices…

wxHexEditor screenshot