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.

Comments

Wrong Shuttle or wrong image name?

[Thornburg]

If this experiment was on Columbia, why is the image called "Challenger_drive.jpg"?

Challenger was many years earlier...

Re:I've had some drives crash on me, but..

[joeytmann]

Ontrack has been doing this type of recovery for years. A couple of times I have asked for quotes, just to even look at the drive was like $1,000US. Can't remember how much it was per MB to retrieve the data. I know they have recovered data for machines lost in hurricane andrew, servers sitting in water for months. They were in Kuwait after the 91 gulf war recovering systems there. I think the only way to not have Ontrack recover a drive is to literally melt the platters.

Re:Yup...

[rthille]

I've got a friend/co-worker/gun-nut who never returns a drive with his data on it. Work gets laptops back, sans drives. He takes them out to the range with a high-powered rifle and puts rounds thru them.

Me, I just use OS-X's write-random 7-times. But if blocks got remapped because of io-errors in the drive, that might be enough for the truely paranoid. If I were that, I'd use my oxy-acetylene torch and just melt the platters to slag, after pulling the magnets out to play with.