Addendum: Dissecting a Hard Drive :: 20/02/10 ~19:15 :: Comments: 0
category: random/tech
Someone asked me if the drive I took apart still works after I put it back together. No, it doesn't. Not least because the platters must be totally unreadable and scratched to hell, but I also took no antistatic precautions before taking it apart, I would ahrdly call my keyboard tray (where all those photos were taken) a clean surface, and also perhaps because the small screw I mentioned that was in the side of the heads which I couldn't photograph - that screw is still sitting on my desk. I had no idea what it was there for, but I assume it was there for a reason.
I'm still waiting on my contact within the police to figure out the precise scope of my dissertation, but I have until Friday to send a list of questions to my uni department to be forwarded on to the police, so I can try to figure out a few things about what I'm actually doing for them here. The questions I've asked are pretty specific, stuff like do they want me to look at logical or physical failures in particular or look at both, do they want me to look at external drives (but not flash memory since that's off topic anyway), and what exactly they expect me to be able to recover from a failed drive. I do have a few concerns about what they are looking for from this research. If they expect me to take a failed, broken drive and somehow resurrect a complete, working filesystem... well that's a lovely world of rainbows and unicorns they're living in. I also asked if they could let me know what the most common types of failure they see are, if they actually know. The other thing I'm worried about is logical failures; if they want me to try to recover data from a logical failure, then I need some actual failed drives to work with. I have no idea if it's possible to force logical failures on a drive, but moreover, if it is possible to do so, then I'll know exactly what's wrong with the drive and be able to workaround it appropriately. I guess that could be one possible use of the research though, if they want me to establish some kind of guidelines for identifying what possible failures there could have been and what you can do to work around them. But I guess i have to wait and see.
Updated my music page with a bit of ramblings about the 2 gigs I've been to this month.
30 Seconds To Mars - Hurricane