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Data Recovered From Space Shuttle Columbia HDD
WmHBlair writes "Data recovered from a 400MB Seagate hard drive carried on the Space Shuttle Columbia has been used to complete a physics experiment performed on the mission in space. The Johnson Space Center sent the recovered drive to Kroll Ontrack in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Considering the shape the drive was in (see picture in the linked article), it could indeed qualify for the 'most amazing disk data recovery ever.'" Update: 05/08 12:51 GMT by T : Reader lucas123 points out a piece at Computerworld with a series of photos of the recovered drive.
It was one of the most iconic and heart-stopping movie images of 2003: the Columbia Space Shuttle ignited, burning and crashing to earth in fragments.
Now, amazingly, data from a hard drive recovered from the fragments has been used to complete a physics experiment - CXV-2 - that took place on the doomed Shuttle mission.
Columbia's fragments were painstakingly and exhaustively collected. Amongst them was a 400MB Seagate hard drive which was in the sort of shape you think it would be in after being in an explosive fire and then hurled to earth from several miles up with a ferocious impact.
The Johnson Space Centre workers analysing the shuttle crash sent it off the CVX-2 (Critical Viscosity of Xenon) experiment engineers, who sent it on to Kroll Ontrack in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to see if the data, any data, could be recovered. For researcher Robert Berg and his team it was the only hope, a terribly slim hope, of salvaging significant data from the experiment looking at Xenon gas flows in microgravity.
The Kroll people managed to recover 90 percent or so of the 400MB of data from the drive with its cracked and burned casing. Now, a few years on, Berg and his team have analysed the data and reported the experiment and its results in the April edition of the Physical Review E journal. These showed that, rather liked whipped cream which changes from a fluid to a near-solid after being whipped or stirred vigorously, the gas Xenon change its viscosity from gas to liquid when similarly treated in very low gravity. The phenomenon of a sudden change in viscosity is called shear thinning.
It was a highly complex experiment needing prologed and detailed analysis of the data on the hard drive to discover the shear thinning effect. But it, like the drive, was eventually found. So ends a twenty-year research project and in doing so helps bring to a finish the dreadful story of the Columbia Space Shuttle mission.
Article on softpeida about it with pictures. http://news.softpedia.com/news/400-MB-Seagate-Drive-Survives-the-Columbia-Space-Shuttle-Disaster-84826.shtml
Alternate feeds for the story:
http://news.softpedia.com/news/400-MB-Seagate-Drive-Survives-the-Columbia-Space-Shuttle-Disaster-84826.shtml
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/194388/space-shuttle-hard-disk-survived-crash.html
Almost looks like the site is denying visits when the referer is slashdot.org. With the below method, I was able to read the full article with no problems.
To get in, simply copy the link in the story into a new browser window and hit enter to come into the site with no referers.
Hope this helps
http://i29.tinypic.com/6h2vll.jpg
Data recovered from Seagate drive in Columbia shuttle disaster
posted on 06 May 2008 20:05
Most amazing disk data recovery ever
It was one of the most iconic and heart-stopping movie images of 2003: the Columbia Space Shuttle ignited, burning and crashing to earth in fragments.
Now, amazingly, data from a hard drive recovered from the fragments has been used to complete a physics experiment - CXV-2 - that took place on the doomed Shuttle mission.
Columbia's fragments were painstakingly and exhaustively collected. Amongst them was a 400MB Seagate hard drive which was in the sort of shape you think it would be in after being in an explosive fire and then hurled to earth from several miles up with a ferocious impact.
The Johnson Space Centre workers analysing the shuttle crash sent it off the CVX-2 (Critical Viscosity of Xenon) experiment engineers, who sent it on to Kroll Ontrack in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to see if the data, any data, could be recovered. For researcher Robert Berg and his team it was the only hope, a terribly slim hope, of salvaging significant data from the experiment looking at Xenon gas flows in microgravity.
The Kroll people managed to recover 90 percent or so of the 400MB of data from the drive with its cracked and burned casing. Now, a few years on, Berg and his team have analysed the data and reported the experiment and its results in the April edition of the Physical Review E journal. These showed that, rather liked whipped cream which changes from a fluid to a near-solid after being whipped or stirred vigorously, the gas Xenon change its viscosity from gas to liquid when similarly treated in very low gravity. The phenomenon of a sudden change in viscosity is called shear thinning.
It was a highly complex experiment needing prologed and detailed analysis of the data on the hard drive to discover the shear thinning effect. But it, like the drive, was eventually found. So ends a twenty-year research project and in doing so helps bring to a finish the dreadful story of the Columbia Space Shuttle mission.
[Chris Mellor, editor.]
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Here is a picture for you:
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=hard-drive-recovered-from-columbia&sc=rss
I'm pretty sure it's the one from the shuttle..
A good general explanation is given by the RCMP (what the hell mounties have to do with computers, like most of Canadian society, is entirely beyond me) http://www.rcmp-grc.gc.ca/tsb/pubs/it_sec/g2-003_e.pdf
If you have the practical need to nuke a drive, used DBAN: http://dban.sourceforge.net/
http://www.networkmirror.com/N132udsTg07EUt3b/blocksandfiles.com/article/5056.html
Kevin Smith on Prince
Here's the link: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=hard-drive-recovered-from-columbia&sc=rss
The second photo on this link shows the inside of the drive:
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=hard-drive-recovered-from-columbia&sc=rss
(Link stolen from another post in this thread)
Why, yes I have been touched by His noodly appendage. And I plan to sue.
Here's an internal view of the drive: http://news.softpedia.com/newsImage/400-MB-Seagate-Drive-Survives-the-Columbia-Space-Shuttle-Disaster-4.jpg
http://www.sciam.com/media/inline/BAA76AE9-F23C-1819-08D80B3BC4D83163_2.jpg
There we go
=Smidge=
For precisely the reliability issue you bring up - most anything on the shuttle has to go through > 8 years of reliability testing - before it can go up. sooo... 2003-8 = 1995. They probably could have gone with something better than 400MB's - but in 1995 did you have 1/2 gig flash storage devices? Hell in 1995 did you have 1/2 a gig of anything?
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=hard-drive-recovered-from-columbia&sc=rss Has a more robust site and the orig tale.
For anyone curious about the actual experiment whose data was recovered:
... The measurements had a temperature resolution of 0.01 mK and were conducted in microgravity aboard the Space Shuttle Columbia to avoid the density stratification caused by Earth's gravity."
The abstract for the science experiment is at http://link.aps.org/abstract/PRE/v77/e041116 (or in the table of contents issue is http://scitation.aip.org/dbt/dbt.jsp?KEY=PLEEE8&Volume=77&Issue=4 ).
"We measured shear thinning, a viscosity decrease ordinarily associated with complex liquids, near the critical point of xenon. The data span a wide range of reduced shear rate
http://www.blocksandfiles.co.uk/contentimages/small/Challenger_drive.jpg
that photo is clearly linked to the article above -- which also doesn't even seem to actually be slashdotted... totally a fritter.
Basically, you pay a bench fee to get the drive examined, and then they send you the costs for recovery - for a desktop HD $500-$1500 depending on the problem. The cool part is that they send you a manifest of the recoverable files/directories so you can make an informed decision.
And they _can_ perform miracles. Including dealing with bent platters. Just depends on what you want to pay.
I must say it's been a great instructional tool for people who've neglected backups. They become wild operational militants after these episodes.
Just remember that the ONLY way to ensure data cannot be recovered on a HD is to raise the drive temp past the Curie Point for the magnetics. (A charcoal BBQ works really well for this. Just pull the electronics and wrap the drive in heavy foil unless you like the smell of roasted phenolic.)
Even if you "format" a drive it means that the waveforms coming off the heads can be interpreted as a certain, predictable value - but also remember that at root, it's an analog system and so artifacts from the prior contents are around, it's just a question of finding and interpreting them... That's why the DoD and other "erase" things are so comprehensive. Trying to obliterate all artifacts.
The experiment relied on telemetry for most of the data. The hard drive capacity was sized to hold only the data between transmissions. According to the journal article written by the scientists: A total of 370 hours of data were recorded (no data rate specified) and 85% of the data had been telemetered before the accident. The recovery allowed them to get the majority of the rest.
The data recovered was from an experiment. I'm pretty sure they didn't have much time to perform experiments on Challenger's last flight.
Uh, 400 megabyte 3.5" hard drives in 1983? I don't think so...
You must be new here.
Flexible bare-metal recovery for Linux/UNIX
Since the Challenger blew up before that kind of hard drive technology existed(1986), I'm pretty sure it's a mistake in picture naming.
Followed by
#dd if=dev/random of=dev/diskWorks for me
(what the hell mounties have to do with computers, like most of Canadian society, is entirely beyond me)
Uh, the RCMP is Canada's version of the FBI. Large-scale criminal investigations tend to involve computers these days.
Unless you meant that Canadians don't need computers in general...
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
According to logic, the image must be named improperly. Challenger blew up before going into space, and would have no data to recover from any experiments performed in space. Another possibility is the image is from the Challenger disaster as Columbia's drive photo wasn't available/released, but they threw in that photo as it's from a Space Shuttle disaster (ie: close enough).
The picture *IS* the 400MB seagate drive. I can tell by the traces and the dimensions of the drive (which there is a ruler at the bottom of the image - it's not a 3.5" factor drive, it's 5.25")
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Don't forget that the lead time on space experiments can be years, and you need to use equipment that was rated for space use when you specced it out... not when it went up... which adds even more lead time. Read up on the shuttle computers some time to get an idea of how conservative they are.
And in this care it was a damn good thing: the higher the information density on the drive, the lower the chance of recovering the data... and they were right on the edge of the possible as it was.
It only takes one man to change the Wisdom of the Crowd to Tyranny of the Masses.
High heat will *destroy* magnetic data... The magnetic material will lose its coercivity at certain temps... MO drives used that principle