Hard Drive Recovery Service?

[Kristian Erik Hermansen]

On 9/8/07, Tom Metro <blu-5a1Jt6qxUNc at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> Yeah, but realigning the platters is not necessarily the objective. Data
> recovery is.
>
> Did they say they couldn't recover the data? If so, I'm sure there is
> another firm that can. Try calling a few more places.

They said they could not recover it.  The reason being that data is
written, usually, to both platters, not just one.  In order to get the
data properly, both platters need to be aligned exactly.  However, I
did push further and asked if it might be possible to recover the
image on one platter.  I hypothesized that since the track would be
filled up on one platter first before switching to the other platter,
I might be able to recover the small image.  Now, this would only be
possible if the disk was sparsely populated AND if the image fit
within the track that was being written to (hopefully at the edge?).
So, he said an engineer would call me on Monday to find this out...

> It sure seems theoretically possible to spin up the platters
> individually, read off the raw data, and process it to retrieve the file
> fragments. That would have to be repeated for each platter. It would be
> very time consuming, unless they've developed some software that
> automatically pieces together the fragments based on meta data found on
> the disk, which is just the thing I'd expect a recovery company to have
> developed.

Yes, forensic data experts call this "data carving".  I've done this
before...but very naively...

> The whole dust issue seems besides the point here. Before they'd mount
> the platter in their test rig, I'd assume they'd clean it. And so what
> if dust has damaged a few spots. They should still be able to recover
> most of the drive.

I would hope so!  But I guess I don't know enough about how the
control and user data are intermingled on the physical platters.
Please enlighten me if you know :-)
-- 
Kristian Erik Hermansen

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