Data Recovered From DVD Leads To Conviction, 24-Year Sentence

Lucas123 writes "The Santa Cruz, Calif. DA's office had been counting on a DVD with the recorded testimony of a victim in case against a serial rapist, but when they popped the video into the player, nothing came up — the disc was blank. To make matters worse, the cop who performed the original interview with the victim told the DA she never said she was 'forced,' so the judge wasn't going to allow the witness to testify in a case where her original statement to police was in conflict with her current testimony. After two local data recovery firms said there was no way to restore the data, a third was able to recover the police interview from two years earlier, which led the defendant to plead guilty earlier this month. Close call."

Comments

eep

[dissy]

Hardware: Recovered Data From a Corrupt DVD Leads To Conviction, 24-Year Sentence

Why did my mind instantly jump to the conclusion that some data recovery tech worker did someone a favor, got sued by the MPAA, and got a 24-year sentence...

Only Meta-Data was damaged

[imaginaryelf]

"Our analysis showed there to be damage to the lead-in section of the data," Keith Gnagey, vice president of professional services for i365, said in an e-mail statement about the recovery effort. That meant any attempt "with normal playing software would not be able to get past the beginning of the data."

That's like the directory tree being messed up but the data being intact.

I can't believe the other "two local data recovery firms" got stumped by this simple problem.

Re:Only Meta-Data was damaged

[Belial6]

When my father owned a computer shop, he would regularly get people trying to sell him software that would let him do "data recovery". There was no way my father was qualified to do data recovery. He eventually focused only on printer repair because he found he wasn't really qualified to even do most PC work. That didn't stop the sales guys from trying to convince him that if he bought their software, he would do fine in the "data recovery" field.

So, it doesn't surprise me that two local data recovery firms got stumped. They probably ran the software they bought against the DVD and when nothing came up, they said it was unrecoverable.

Re:Only Meta-Data was damaged

[bigjarom]

I'm interested to know how you came to this conclusion. Did you find the laser-etched dust particle on the finished disk?

Maybe you could send the dust to Seagate Recovery Service to get that blank section back.

Re:Only Meta-Data was damaged

[the_womble]

Maybe the headline should read "incompetent data recovery nearly lets rapist get away"

Re:That third house wasn't ILM was it? (not a joke

[ColdWetDog]

in a day where a few people in their basement can render decent cgi, I'm wondering if this "third firm" was not hired to do a little "extraordinary rendering"

For best results, one should loosen their tin-foil hat occasionally.

Just sayin'.

Disc wasn't finalized

[CyberZCat]

This is a very common problem that happens when a disc isn't finalized on both audio CDs and video DVDs that are recorded on direct to disc consumer recording systems. After a the actual data is written what is a essentially a "table of contents" has to be written at the beginning of the disc, otherwise you get the "blank disc" effect as describe here. That two separate data specialists couldn't figure this out is rather concerning...

Re:Dust on media

[Chris Tucker]

Usually it's physical contact first, THEN the tissue.