Indiana Court Rules Melted Down Hard Drive Not Destruction of Evidence

An anonymous reader writes An Indiana court has ruled that a hard drive that was sent to recycling was not destruction of evidence. The ruling stems from a BitTorrent file-sharing case filed by Malibu Media where a defendant claimed that his hard drive had failed thanks to heavy use. Malibu claimed that the act was destruction of evidence and filed a motion demanding a default judgement. The court denied this motion suggesting that because the hard drive failed, there was no evidence to destroy in the first place.

Comments

Re:Hello microwave

[tibit]

That's not the case with modern hard drives, at least nothing made in the last decade. You worked on such a machine long time ago and/or you weren't told really what it was for. The machine you worked on, if it was done for recovery of drives made after 1998 or thereabouts, was simply made to read data that was not overwritten. It was to be used when one wished to read the drive's contents without using the drive's electromechanical system to do so. Such a machine makes life easier iff you have reverse-engineered enough of the drive to know the encoding used on the data, and the formatting of all the housekeeping information. It lets you skip having to do platter transplants, and generally having to use the drive's own firmware for data recovery - where the firmware wasn't designed for that.