Direct MP3 Download: My Hard Drive Died #5 – Overwritten Hard Drives
Hosted by Steve Cherubino and Scott Moulton of MyHardDriveDied.com.
In this show we cover:
- Story about the Keynote at The Computer Forensic Show – www.techfusion.com
- Discussion about overwritten hard drives and how and why people think there is some magic machine that can recover data
- REDIRECTION of bad blocks leaving data on the hard drive that is not overwritten
- How you can properly overwrite current hard drives
Topics Discussed
- Computer Forensics Show‘s keynote speaker, described how overwritten data was restored, but the conference was not anywhere about that.
- Back in 80’s Drives worked like floppies making the recovery of overwritten data was maybe possible, with a very high error rate.
- Hard Drives that had been made about 10 years ago are a completely different thing, making it more impossible to recover overwritten data.
- An equipment called a Magnetic Microscope to try to recover data.
- An other equipment called Spin Stand to try to recover data.
- Disks have a “reserved area” to store information from the bad block, also called P-list
- A G-list is a list of bad blocks for the disk not to use them again.
- A good idea is to look for the S.M.A.R.T. results before the HD crashes.
- If there’s a S.M.A.R.T. warning it would be a good idea to change your drive.
- How to Properly Overwrite HD? Use the ATA Command to erase and overwrite HDs, doing a DoD sanitation.
- A program written by Dr. Gordon Hughes from the Center for Magnetic Recording Research
- A software tool used is Boot and Nuke (DBAN)
- Tools to recover data, PC300, Atola, among others.
- Data Recovery classes.
- Is it ok to freeze a Hard Drive? Scott says it’s not the best solution, it might cause damage the drive, but sometimes it might work.
- Maybe try the refrigerator first before the freezer, not to cause to big of a temperature change.
- Tip to use instead of freezing: use a USB cooler (small refrigerators) to cool the HD and keep it cool, Scott uses an aluminum bay and hook up a couple of these ceramic pieces to keep the HD cool.
Thanks, and out -click-
Show Notes by Luis Perez from GeekForce Guatemala
