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Salon On Computer Forensics
splorf writes "Salon has a
good new article on computer forensics, focusing on Lee Tydalska, a guy in Southern California who started collecting old computers and peripherals as a hobby, and now has a nice business doing data recovery from weird and obsolete media for investigators (or normal users who just need media conversion). "It hardly needs saying why this craft has grown in importance",
the article says, "but if one word sums it up, it's 'Enron-itis'". Oh yes, the #1 outfit in the field is apparently a UK firm called Vogon International. You've got to love this stuff."
"we can recover any data, even punch cards from a planet blown to pieces to make a path for a new hyperspace bypass"
--- sig moved for great justice.
From your description I can only assume that the storage devices which you have are a little old... it sounds like they have deteriorated over time
In order to restore these disks for use in a modern computer system, may I suggest that you carefully take apart the disk, ensuring you dont loose the little spring
Once you have removed the black bit from inside, it needs to be renovated
a coating of nail varnish works quite well
scatter ground up matchstick heads over the top of the disk and put it back together
Your computer should then be able to read it
if it still doesnt work, try a more expensive computer
Ah! You seem well versed in the old stuff!
Perhaps you know where I could find a tape player that can run this??
The speed of time is one second per second.
I once had to retire a Mac LC II was the building fileserver. This thing had financials, the private records of students; you name it. I low-leveled the drive and wrote 0's to it. Once that was done, I drilled several holes through the platters. I broke the bit off the drill in the process. The drive with drill bit stub stuck in it looks like Count Datatula with a spike through his heart. We keep the spiked carcass around to show people how to make sure that sensitive data gets destroyed.
Want to verify you're wiping everything? Want to be really sure? take the platters out of your hard disk and grind them into powder, then mix them into cement blocks and drop them off a pier
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"