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 […]

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