Data from Columbia disk drives survived the shuttle accident

Data from Columbia disk drives survived the shuttle accident

news.yahoo.com

Jon Edwards often manages what appears impossible. He has recovered precious data from computers wrecked in floods and fires and dumped in lakes. Now Edwards may have set a new standard: He found information on a melted disk drive that fell from the sky when space shuttle Columbia disintegrated in 2003

(visit the link for the full news article)

Thats good lets wait & see what they find in that recovered data

news.yahoo.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

That was a very cool story. Apparently, since they used dos the material stored was closer to the core as opposed to peripherally that was charred. Makes me think that if I ever have to trash a computer I'm going to take a drill to its hard drive and skewer it multiple times. Don't want my online banking info out there.

That is a good example of a news piece title saying one thing and the news piece itself saying a different thing.

Data from Columbia's drives did not survived, the data of only one of three disk drives was recovered, the other two disks were unusable.

reply to post by jpm1602


The best way of destroying a hard disk is by using a very high temperature.

As you can see on that news piece, the other two drives were unusable because there is a temperature for each material that changes its magnetic capabilities.

Technically very correct Art. The header is a bit misleading. Recovering any data at all was pretty astounding tho. Thanks for heads up on hd destruction. I'll put in with a roast at 400.

Cant you also destroy a hard drive with very strong magnets?

That I have also heard of Dar. Good point. Noted.

That's a pretty impressive story - I just wish I had one 1/100th as good to tell down the pub!

That's a real interesting line of work - one you could get a start on in your own time at home on the cheap... I'm gonna have to have a play sometime ... I gave an old hard drive platter to my mother once a long time ago - she saw it hanging around and wanted it as a little mirror that she could keep in her hand bag and check the back of her hair in other mirrors, I wonder what was on that little baby - It's got to have a couple of years of fingerprints on it.... actually that should pretty much be written off by now.

Can you imagine the dinero these cyberfreaks make per year of these hd retrievals? Had my puter in for service in broadview hts once and the guy told me one of his clients brought in his home company puter with all his customer links that got fried by a lightning hit. He even had a back up hd that was smoked too. When he was told all the data was lost he cried like a baby. Removable gig hd only way to go for backup.

reply to post by jpm1602


Yhea - I did a short spell on the phones for Acer, standard advice was pretty much to do a system recovery in the event of system problems - and to be honest so many people seemed like they wouldn't pass a tin opener operating test I rarely went in depth with them - any who needless to say they would loose any data on the 1st partition. I've had people burst into tears and all sorts saying stuff like all my family pictures are on there and I've lost a baby (that baby one was actual HDD failure) - I would just say off the record google data recovery services - people can do it.

Tin opener test...rofl...sounds like me. That was very funny. lol. I didn't know how to use a mouse till 96. Sad but true.

The Columbia used DOS?

Lol... those funding cutbacks sure hurt NASA.

While this is amazing, I agree that it is a misleading headline to the story, done no doubt to get more attention.

I was going to post it a couple days ago, until I learned the data is the results of an experiment and not a black box filled with audio or video of the final moments or additional data that was not captured by Houston - which is what I had envisioned when I first saw the headline.

By the way I've recovered a few drives as part of my work - usually drives that are making noise or in the process of failing. I wouldn't mind doing nothing but recovery, but then you'd need to have at least one of every drive that's been in use for the past few years as you use the parts from the good drives to read the data from the platters. So, there's allot of overhead involved - some which never gets used and just ends up as scrap eventually.

When you think about it, it's very inexpensive to have the work done considering the time it would take to recreate you data from scratch - which often is impossible if it's pictures of your kids 5 years ago or business records for which there is no paper copy or backup.

reply to post by The Godfather of Conspira


Is that so surprising? After all that's what was in use and most reliable during its design. Remember too, that the shuttles have been retrofitted with more modern cockpits than the original design. We also have many aircraft in use in the military that still have cables & wires running the full length of the aircraft to actuate control surfaces because that's how the were designed and are still flying.


[edit on 11-5-2008 by verylowfrequency]