Video Recovering Data From Broken Hard Drives and SSDs (Video) 173
Russell Chozick: I am Russell Chozick, from Flashback Data, data recovery and computer forensics firm in Austin, Texas.
Robin Miller: So, if I accidentally were to remove the hard drive from this computer and throw it out in the thrash and waste management corporation took it to their landfill, you would go through that landfill and find it for me.
Russell Chozick: I don’t know if I want to go through a landfill, but if that drive is bent in half or completely smashed into millions of pieces, then if we find that thing, I’ll get data from it.
Robin Miller: Okay. Because actually there’s another video interview we did not that long ago with a company that destroys data.
Russell Chozick: Yeah.
Robin Miller: They destroy hard drives.
Russell Chozick: Yeah, we do it sometimes here ourselves.
Robin Miller: So, how destroyed a hard drive can you save?
Russell Chozick: No, there’s varying levels of unrecoverableness that we come across, if the physical platters are destroyed, i.e. the data is actually completely scraped off of them because of a full-on head crash where there’s little filters inside of a hard drive that filter in until no dirty air can get into them and that thing looks black, that means your data just got scraped off of that hard drive platter right into that filter and no one is going to get that back.
As far as lot of laptop drives have blast platters, if you throw that thing on the ground hard enough, that glass shatters, no one is going to get that data, but the stuff we have recovered from that is pretty severe, for example, drives that have been submerged in salt water for a long time after Hurricane Sandy, Katrina, any of the big natural disasters, we’ve recovered from fire damage where that drive looks like it’s completely melted. But we’re still able to save it.
So there’s definite ways to destroy it and obviously the destruction company is ____2:19. I think I looked at their video. They talk about degaussing and when you degauss a hard drive, you also erase the servo track, so not only is it unrecoverable and it’s never even usable again. So then you just got to send it to the recyclers. But what we do here to destroy data is either overwrite it by writing data over the entire portion of the hard drive, but completely overwriting it or we crush them or we send them to a destruction company as well if we’ve done whole lot that we need to get rid off.
Robin Miller: Obviously destroying as a number of people, Slashdot readers, yes, you know, how you are, you guys pointed out, you could have a lot of fun with a sledge hammer instead of spending money to destroy hard drives.
Russell Chozick: Yeah, you got to make sure that thing is good and smashed, because especially with the larger desktop drives and SCSI drives, those things are pretty durable, and you got to really beat that thing up to make a dent in those platters because they’re pretty strong.
Robin Miller: What do you do with SSDs, what do you do with the digital drives?
Russell Chozick: Well, it’s kind of evolved through our business; when we first started we didn’t have the technology to read directly from NAND Flash memory, so what we do and it was fairly common was pretty simple part replacement type stuff where Flash drives controller fails, we would take the actual memory chip itself, find an identical circuit board, take the Flash memory, put it on the new circuit board or make electronic repairs on the actual board itself and then recover the data that way. But it’s evolved quite a bit. So we’ve done a lot of research and development over years and we are pretty much on the forefront of Flash technology where what we started to do is, you know what let’s get a device programmer and start reading the data into the computer raw and see what it looks like.
Now when you look at Flash media read in raw straight from a USB drive, it’s completely mixed up. The way that Flash controllers work is they are constantly reorganizing the data for wear-leveling and encryption and all kinds of different algorithms to make to; one, speed up the Flash memory and two, make sure that you’re not going to wear out certain cells before other cells to make it last long time.
So what you get when you read just the Flash memory is take the controller out of the situation you get, just the whole bunch of scramble data that is not only the data area, but there’s also portions of each sector that contain information about error correction and kind of clues on how the data is reassembled. So what we started to look at was how we can kind of reverse engineer the controllers once we have the raw data read in, and that’s how it’s evolved.
Now what we can do is as long as the data is not encrypted we can pull the Flash memory itself off. The actual data chips, for example, here is an SSD drive and these are the data chips, pull those off and look for markers that – common markers on a file system. For example, we know what FAT32 file system looks likes typically in a linear format. So we may find part of the FAT file system on one chip and part of the FAT file system in another chip, and what we have to do is rearrange the data to where it kind of lines up and gets an order and then the computer can – and then kind of reimage that and then we can use that image to rebuild the file system on the Flash. And it sounds very complicated and
Robin Miller: It sounds expensive actually.
Russell Chozick: It sounds very complicated than it is, but basically what we’ve done is we’ve built kind of an internal wiki of cases, so once we crack one, we see it again, it’s much easier for us to do it again, and we have thousands of it. I mean, so we see it a lot and so it’s starting to get to the point where the costs are coming down, but new challenges keep arising as new chip form factors start coming out and they keep making these devices smaller, I know you probably seen micro SD cards.
They’re extremely small and there’s actually no independent Flash memory on those. It’s basically a monolithic chip that contains the controller and the Flash in one chip. So in order to recover something like that it requires a lot of patience. We basically have to take sand paper and find all the traces on the device, sand it down until it’s just to its bare traces, and then use a logic analyzer and find out where all the data points are to actually connect straight to the Flash, which now in that example those are the types of recoveries that are extremely expensive right now because it’s a lot of manual work, whereas, if it’s a typical type of NAND Flash memory, those are starting to get where we’ve got nerves where we can get them in and get them out pretty quickly.
Robin Miller: I’m assuming that people who come to you that the data is valuable. I had one ever hard drive failure where I didn’t have stuff backed up, that’s critical, just one and I spent $600 to get my data.
Russell Chozick: And you know that to backup and then back up your back ups. We will FTP people critical information, but we’re not going to let them download 40 gigs of information what they’ve recovered. So what we found now is we started using – any time speed increases happen we started using the newest technology, so anyone that comes in with a MacDrive will it out of whatever enclosure that they have and we’ll put it right in our thunderbolt dock and use thunderbolt to a thunderbolt source and a thunderbolt destination to make sure that we can move data as fast as possible and then all of our systems are – the PCs are all the USB 3 in any status, so we can move data as fast as possible. It’s just going to take very less time for us to move data and get it in the mail overnight than it is to use the Internet . Austin is getting Google fiber here soon, so...
Robin Miller: Isn’t that special. Are you all happy? Why doesn't Manatee County, where we have more cows than people, Manatee County, Florida, we need that more than you guys....
Russell Chozick: Well, I mean I know the cows use a lot of bandwidth, so maybe that’s why they won’t let you guys. This industry is a bit strange and you really have to be careful on who you use, because your first chance of data recovery is always usually the best. There’s a lot of people out there that claim to do it all and maybe they can and that’s great, and I know there’s lot of great companies out there. But there’s a lot that see dollar signs in this and they maybe can only do low level or logical stuff, logical recoveries recovered from corrupt files systems and things like that, and they can’t work on the stuff that I’m talking about here where I have to wire up memory chip from an Android phone to pull data off of it.
You can’t tell me that a one man shop somewhere is going to be able to have the resources to do that, this is an expensive business to run, we have expensive equipment, we have large lab space, lot of computers, lot of overhead, we have laminate flow benches to open hard drives underneath, we have a huge parts inventory, so there’s just – you just got to be careful on who you use, and there are several reputable companies out there.
Robin Miller: Well, look we can see right behind you, those are some very uncheap looking racks with monitors on top of them.
Russell Chozick: Yeah, I mean, and to be honest, those computers are typical every day computers, but there’s hardware in there for imaging computers that is very expensive, what’s running right back here are we got three different computers all imaging hard drive sector-by-sector and what it does is when it runs into bad sectors, it can dig deeper, it can skip that, it can come back to that later, we could even say it, oh we really want to image everything that’s on one certain surface of the platter of the hard drive and things like that.
So we can get real granular and we could also go forwards and we can go backwards and then we could say, set the time out for a little bit longer. So we can kind of create our own algorithm for how a driver is behaving. And this stage is even after we’ve done the physical work to the drive. So pretend the read/write heads failed on a particular drive, we bring it into our clean room, we do any kind of part replacement that may need to be done to repair, temporarily repair the drive and then it goes to back here where we image the drive.
It’s a non-tech savvy that really just think that the devices are invincible and that or it’s not going to happen to them, but it does, and we do recoveries for a wide range of people anywhere and like you said, the data is got to be valuable, but the most irreplaceable data is sometimes what lot of people would consider not that valuable in a sense of this is going to take my whole business down. It’s more like pictures of your kids since they were a baby and if someone has that only in the digital format that’s the kind of data that it’s not only irreplaceable, you can’t create that again.
BS Summary (Score:5, Insightful)
Do one overwrite with zeros for magnetic media. They cannot recover that. Open the drive, take out the platters, bend or break them, they cannot recover that. SSDs are more tricky, but one overwrite with random data assures that no more than the spare capacity can be recovered.
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snips? and here i was thinking thermite was the answer to all data destruction needs. i havealso thought about building a emp device i have the designs for one somewhere, that should work to.
Re:BS Summary (Score:5, Funny)
Thermite, like duct tape, is the solution to damn near everything.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some men in black suits and dark glasses at my door, and I think they want to talk to me....
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Thermite, like duct tape, is the solution to damn near everything.
So, if "Perl is the duct tape of the Internet", what is X and Y in "X is the thermite of Y"?
Duct tape is like the Force. (Score:3)
There is a light side and a dark side.
Use the tape wisely.
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Thermite, like duct tape, is the solution to damn near everything.
Why did I spend all my mod points before finding this post? (Though it was already +5)
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I've found that thermite is not a terribly effective contraceptive. Well, not if you want to have a sex life afterwards.
Re:BS Summary (Score:5, Funny)
Do one overwrite with zeros for magnetic media.
I just send all my broken storage media to the Nixon Presidential Library, labelled "18 1/2 minutes" in a box with a return address for "Flasback Data Recovery Specialists: We Recover Anything, Confidentiality Guaranteed. Austin, TX." They replace all the 1s and 0s with pure silence. Nothing beats that.
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Do one overwrite with zeros for magnetic media.
I just send all my broken storage media to the Nixon Presidential Library, labelled "18 1/2 minutes" in a box with a return address for "Flasback Data Recovery Specialists: We Recover Anything, Confidentiality Guaranteed. Austin, TX." They replace all the 1s and 0s with pure silence. Nothing beats that.
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Best way to clean a hard drive. Give it to my grandson. He can dismantle it, use a platter with the dog as a frisbee, strip away the electronics for projects, and don't worry. He once wanted some oxide, and scraped the platter surface to remove it all.
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I used to use 'dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda1' on every laptop that got decommissioned from the network and donated or sold.
It's not rocket surgery.
Re:BS Summary (Score:4, Insightful)
You're close. Overwriting media with zeros almost entirely erases everything - there was a time when it was possible for someone with a highly specialised magnetic probe to pick up leftover traces from the space between the tracks, but modern drives have the tracks far too close for that. There is just one place data may survive: Remapped sectors. The drive logic does detect if a sector is going to fail or already failed, and if so will remap it to a spare area, just as SSDs do. The old data gets left behind in the now-disused space.
But all that'll save is the odd little fragment here and there, either 512 bytes or 16k depending on the drive. An attacker would need a lot of luck to find something good in there.
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"You're close. Overwriting media with zeros almost entirely erases everything - there was a time when it was possible for someone with a highly specialised magnetic probe to pick up leftover traces from the space between the tracks, but modern drives have the tracks far too close for that"
I don't think that this is merely about the tracks being too close to each other. One has to keep in mind that today, "overwriting a sector with zeros" basically means "overwriting one existing continuous magnetic trace on the media with a trace of semi-randomly alternating magnetized domains that happens to be related to the semi-random alternating magnetization changes of the existing trace by means of a fractional (analog) offset that continuously drifts along the trace)". That's one hell of a problem fo
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Secure Erase is even more brilliant than that. Modern SSDs (and phones) run 128bit/256bit AES encryption full-time. So when the drive needs to be Secure Erased, they simply throw away the key and generate a new one.
As a result the data has been rendered inert in a fraction of the time it would take to actually overwrite it, and without needing to put all of the cells through a P/E cycle.
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So instead of using some random erasing tool, use the ATA SECURE ERASE command. That explicitly erases all data, including sectors included in the G-list.
If you trust the firmware and if you know your drive will support it.
I asked Segate, as an "industry partner" for a list of their drive model numbers that implement ATA Secure Erase (for a linux tool to do better erasing). They flatly refused to disclose that information.
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Do one overwrite with zeros for magnetic media. They cannot recover that
For those that don't believe it:
Assume, for argument's sake, that one could recover one previous generation of data written to magnetic media after an single overwrite. That means a nominal 1TB drive could be used to store 2TB of data. The fact that no hard drive manufacturer has been able to take advantage of any hysteresis effect to increase their storage densities is a strong indication that it's not possible.
http://xkcd.com/808/
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Maybe they are selling 2 TB drives as 1 TB drives that keep a history of old data and then profit from the recovery services? ;)
Re:BS Summary (Score:5, Informative)
you can recover 1 overwrite actually....
You cannot. Or rather:
* Nobody has ever demonstrated success of recovering data from a modern hard drive (anything more recent than MFM) that has been overwritten even one time.
* The person who wrote the paper on recovering data from drives after erasure, Gutmann, has said there is no reason to believe that it is possible with modern drives.
* Other people have a quite sound theoretical arguments that it is impossible. (That is, there is a hysteresis effect, but it is so small compared to noise that the statistical probability of getting correct data instead of random data is much, much too small to be of any practical use even in a best-case scenario.)
This is a myth in computer forensics and security that needs to die.
Re:BS Summary (Score:5, Funny)
Nice try NSA guy.
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Nice try NSA guy.
He is now going to disappear you with his Quantum Computer Wormhole gun.
Try laughing when your tortured body is smeared around an antimatter blackhole in another galaxy, for eternity, like in that Star Trek..
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Couldn't you account for the hysteresis effect by reading the value first, then changing the strength of the write accordingly?
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In what sense do you mean "account for"? Do you mean, could the drive controller overcome the hysteresis to minimize it?
Possibly, but that's a lot more work, and it turns out not to be necessary. Note that the idea people have in their heads about drives -- that there is some little region of the drive that is magnetized one way for a one and one way for a zero and is "just one" bit -- is no longer accurate. The magnetic patterns on disk are rather complicated. (This is a major contributor to why recovering
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No, you cannot.
Show me any data recovery company that says they can and I will show you a liar.
People have many times put up money to see this done and no one has ever demonstrated it.
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That doesnt mean it cant be done.
This is like saying "i have a new encryption method, and noone has yet demonstrated that they can break it". That does not mean that it is secure, or a that a simple analysis of the method would not display glaring weaknesses; someone could very well be exploiting it and simply keeping it on the DL.
It is hypothetically possible to recover from a single overwrite, because it is a fact that "magnetic domain remnants" are left after an overwrite. Whether or not we have the
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It is hypothetically possible to recover from a single overwrite, because it is a fact that "magnetic domain remnants" are left after an overwrite.
Incorrect, plain and simple--though it was true 20 years ago. Bits no longer occupy a wide swath of domains only partially set to the current orientation.
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That doesnt mean it cant be done.
Yes it does, or else people would be doing it. And, no, saying "but the NSA can do it on their planet-sized quantum computer, but I'm not allowed to talk about it" isn't sufficient excuse.
If you say "it is possible to do X" then it is up to you (or someone) to do X.
For something like recovering data from a hard drive, you're not talking about some weird theoretical possibility that might be testable in the future. As of now, it's either possible or it's not.
This is irrespective of any actual techni
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Yes it does, or else people would be doing it.
That was the argument for Mac viruses. It couldnt be done, till technology and markets trends changed, and it started being done.
"Cant" and "dont currently" are vastly different.
Re:BS Summary (Score:5, Informative)
That's incorrect. Current drives store information in individual (as in single) magnetic domains. A magnetic force microscope is of no help there. Once you flip a domain, you've flipped it. There's no history, no layers, nada. You're referring to information that was current 20 years ago.
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You're referring to information that was current 20 years ago.
20 years has not changed the fact that magnetic domains are analog, not digital. "Once you flip it, you've flipped it" isnt a concept that really exists in the analog world until your drive's firmware converts the analog reading to a digital 0.
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20 years has not changed the fact that magnetic domains are analog, not digital. "Once you flip it, you've flipped it" isnt a concept that really exists in the analog world until your drive's firmware converts the analog reading to a digital 0.
Magnetic domains do not partially flip. They do go "all or nothing", and there is no "history" of the prior orientation.
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sources please?
1) freshman physics; 2) the definition of "magnetic domain"--that's what it means.
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The analog signal is what you get from a magnetoresistive head, but that head is still reading one domain at a time. The state of one domain is binary, all-or-nothing. There's nothing analog about domains. To get "analog", you need thousands of domains -- their average state is what the head of a tape audio recorder is reproducing. The averaging can be any combination of spatial and temporal, so without doing any mechanical changes to a hard drive you could still write to it like you did in a tape recorder
Re:BS Summary (Score:5, Informative)
Let me pile on with the "no you cannot". Once this was true, back in the days of MFM drives, because there was lots of redundant magnetic media on that drive. But the need to squeeze out every last bit of data density on drives has changed that - any place on the media where leftover traces of previous writes could be found is a place where more bits could be fit on the platter. Still, with older IDE drives you might have wanted to do one pass of random data instead of 0s, if you were worried about an opponent with an electron microscope (I've actually seen bits on tape in an electron microscope image - very cool).
GMR [wikipedia.org] drives took that trend even farther, by using the Z-axis to help store each bit, not just the surface of the platter. With modern drives the media is completely used to store current data.
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But the need to squeeze out every last bit of data density on drives has changed that - any place on the media where leftover traces of previous writes could be found is a place where more bits could be fit on the platter
That has nothing to do with the theory of how the data could be recovered. The theory was that flipping a 1 to a 0 is really like applying a "0" magnetic field to a bit that is currently "0.961235", and you end up with "0.015132". Hypothetically, maybe, some could analyze that "0.015132" and determine that it was previously a "0.961235", and reconstruct the data that way.
Its never been demonstrated, or proven, or disproven; conventional wisdom is that if possible it is quite difficult.
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That has nothing to do with the theory of how the data could be recovered. The theory was that flipping a 1 to a 0 is really like applying a "0" magnetic field to a bit that is currently "0.961235", and you end up with "0.015132". Hypothetically, maybe, some could analyze that "0.015132" and determine that it was previously a "0.961235", and reconstruct the data that way.
On the contrary, it has everything to do with it. The theory you mention had to do with the fact that bits were much larger, occupying many domains, and the new write might not flip every domain, thus leaving behind the trace of the prior value. When a bit is a single domain, there is no trace of the prior value.
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The omnipresent and omnipotent "government" also has captive fairies that they let foreign dignitaries have some fun with, from time to time. Yeah, sure.
Re:BS Summary (Score:5, Insightful)
"Using quantum detection for variations in the strength of the magnetic field (government level equipment) can detect multiple layers."
This sounds like total bullshit to me. We already have to use heavy error-correcting codes on pretty much all modern media to read even the last thing you wrote on them. What makes you think that whatever residual magnetism remains after a mere zeroing (although I'd opt for /dev/urandom instead) is sufficient to restore whatever had been written on it before that?
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If you want to make data non-recoverable from a HD, remove the platters, put them on a drill press and turn them into Swiss cheese with the biggest bit the drill will hold.
Large chunks of data (between the holes) will still be recoverable.
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One small hole and a few CCs of ferric chloride. Shaken, not stirred...
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Using quantum detection for variations in the strength of the magnetic field (government level equipment) can detect multiple layers.
What you seem to be unaware of is that, when The Government want to restore a destroyed hard drive, They simply use their Quantum Flux Capacitor Time Machine to go back in time to just before you tried to wipe it and get their Men in Black to zap you and copy the disk.
When you return to consciousness, you have no recollection of what has happened (since they obviously reset time after they leave), so you set about overwriting the disk, or dissolving it in acid or whatever, and have no idea how they manage
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Zero percent, GP is speaking out of his nether orifice. Strictly speaking, it is theoretically possible to do what GP is suggesting, in the same way it is theoretically possible for a well-placed sneeze to cause a chain reaction culminating in the obliteration of the universe. In other words, possible in the strictestly sense of the word, but impossible in every other sense.
Re:BS Summary (Score:5, Informative)
That paper is from 1996. The updated epilogue contains this quote:
Any modern drive will most likely be a hopeless task, what with ultra-high densities and use of perpendicular recording I don't see how MFM would even get a usable image [...]
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That statement =/= "impossible", but rather "not feasible".
In other words, you probably dont want to rely on it as secure destruction if the information will be sensitive years from now, because new technology could change "not feasible" to "doable".
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That statement =/= "impossible", but rather "not feasible".
In other words, you probably dont want to rely on it as secure destruction if the information will be sensitive years from now, because new technology could change "not feasible" to "doable".
Yes, and aliens might teleport a vast black hole to the centre of the Earth and destroy our planet tomorrow for the lulz.
There are some possibilities so remote that they're not worth worrying about.
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In reality however, overwriting magnetic storage with 0s doesn't actually remove the data*.
Yes, it does. 20 years ago it did not, but now it does.
Best way to destroy the drive... (Score:4, Interesting)
A small four-pound sledge and a suitable hard surface to act as an anvil and one can break the aluminum case into bits in a couple minutes and crease and crack the platters to the point that there realistically isn't anything being read from there. If you're REALLY worried, break out the plasma cutter and just cut the platters into bits...
Speaking of bits, Spanish colonial currency were "pieces of eight". "Shave and a Haircut, two bits" is a $0.25 cost. So, eight bits to a full unit... Coincidence for eight bits to a byte, or intentional?
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Interesting, I never knew that... I was sorta hoping it was intentional, but looks like we have to blame a combination of ASCII (popularizing 7-bit over 4- or 6-bit) and the rise of 8-bit machines.
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Speaking of bits, Spanish colonial currency were "pieces of eight". "Shave and a Haircut, two bits" is a $0.25 cost. So, eight bits to a full unit... Coincidence for eight bits to a byte, or intentional?
Coincidence. I imagine it makes a lot of sense to keep the size of a byte as a power of two (for addressing reasons, maybe?) 4 bits isn't even enough to represent all of the characters in the Latin alphabet, and 16 bits was probably overkill at the beginning of the computer revolution.
:)
This is all a bunch of random guesswork. I have no facts for any of this
What is a "Byte"? (Score:2)
>> I imagine it makes a lot of sense to keep the size of a byte as a power of two (for addressing reasons, maybe?)
I hope you're kidding, but in case you're not: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte [wikipedia.org]
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Kevin Flynn: Hey! Hold it right there!
Bit: Yes.
Kevin Flynn: What do you mean, "yes"?
Bit: Yes.
Kevin Flynn: Is that all you can say?
Bit: No.
Kevin Flynn: Know anything else?
Bit: Yes.
Kevin Flynn: Positive and negative, huh. You're a bit, aren't you?
Bit: Yes.
Kevin Flynn: Well, where's your program? Isn't he going to miss you?
Bit: No.
Kevin Flynn: I'M your program?
Bit: Yes.
Kevin Flynn: Pretty good driving, huh?
[CRASH]
Bit: No.
Bits are very direct. I figured a byte was a bit that knew 8 different ways of saying yes or no, but I was confused about how bits and bytes would communicate, because the bit wouldn't understand all the nuanced shades of yes or no. It seemed like a very fuzzy kind of logic. I made a mental note to study it further in junior high school, as a primer for studying other... curiosities..
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Kevin Flynn: I'M your program?
Bit: Yes.
You forgot the most important part:
Kevin Flynn: Great, another mouth to feed.
Bit: Yes! Yes! Yes! [...]
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break out the plasma cutter and just cut the platters into bits
Damn all I have is a wire feed welder so I guess I will just have to turn up the power.
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Or you could simply degauss the drive, or raise it to the curie temperature, rather than dealing with "sort of effective" and difficult methods of destruction.
Im not clear why people suggest shattering the platter; it doesnt "destroy" the data (simply separates it), its time consuming (unless you were already going for the magnets inside), and generally a quick zero-wipe will be sufficient and more effective for most cases, and degauss / curie temperature will suffice for all others.
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I formatted a hard disk drive last night to use it for something else. Smashing it to pieces would have been much faster and more satisfying.
I just pop into my local undertakers and get my mate Dave, the night security guard, to chuck it in the next coffin up for cremation.
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Formatting your drive most likely got rid of none of the data.
All a format does is prepare the necessary bits for storing data (file tables etc). It doesnt usually overwrite the whole drive, even if you pick "full format".
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I use multiple passes of random data in a working drive, but when the controller is bad and I have data on the drives I don't want people to get to, I take it apart, save the magnets and shatter the (now glass) platters.
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The difference between an overwrite and shattering the drive is like the difference between burning sensitive papers, and simply ripping them into shreds.
Ripping them up may make it difficult to get at, but a really determined attacker could conceivably recover some data.
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Sure, but when I _can't_ write to the drive because it's gone bad, then I don't have the choice of 'overwrite'. I suppose I could use my belt sander or welding torch on the platters, but I think shattering them into little pieces and putting some in one trash cycle and some in another works well enough. I'm paranoid, but not that paranoid.
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And it's also how many tentacles a single whole-unit octopus has! And how many planets there are (since the loss of Pluto) in the whole solar system. And it's how many ounces are in a .. shit, is it a cup or a pound? I can never remember that one.
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Crease the platters? These days, they are _GLASS_ coated with metal, and they shatter into _many_ pieces when they break.
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If you want weird, program a PIC.
The RAM is eight-bit.
The ROM is fourteen-bit.
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Taking a byte as the smallest individually addressable unit of memory, longest I ever saw was 60 bits, on the1970s and .1980s Control Data machines I used.
Speaking of Recovering Things (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Speaking of Recovering Things (Score:5, Informative)
not disguised at all. If the first words of the summary arent " somerandomuser writes" , then I know that it wasnt user submitted, and is being pushed in from above. I only come into the comments of these types of stories to verify that I didnt click through to their ads.
Slashdot is vulnerable and should be updated (Score:2)
Thanks to Slashdot's video implementation, I get a big div in the middle of the screen that says,
This plugin is vulnerable and should be updated.
Check for updates...
Click here to activate the Adobe Flash plugin.
Now my Firefox is up to date and the Flash plugin was updated earlier this month.
Re:Slashdot is vulnerable and should be updated (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe you haven't updated Firefox in a while. Are you still using yesterday's version?
Advertisement within an advertisement? (Score:2)
I assumed the video was just a shameless promotion for the company, but clicked it anyway. Then, I saw that I was supposed to sit through a 30 second advertisement for some other random $#!T just so I can see an ad for this company ?
Sorry, No.
Re:Advertisement within an advertisement? (Score:5, Insightful)
Just curious, why did you attempt to obscure the word "SHIT" in your post?
Just say it. SHIT. It's a wonderful, useful word, just like FUCK, HELL, TITS, ASS, CUNT, DICK, and so many others that describe Slashdot and those who make it yet another newsvertisement site.
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You've hurt my feelings since you didn't obscure SHIT.
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Just wipe the SHIT across the other naughty words on your screen.
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Comment removed (Score:3)
Bad interview (Score:2)
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There are a lot of crooks and unprofessionals in data recovery. Immoral scum that prey on those already in pain. Seems this guy is not quite on that level, but fits in somewhere with grand promises he cannot deliver on.
Personal experience with them - they are legit (Score:3)
Not disagreeing that the video was pretty bad - I can't say I'd do any better if asked to do an interview off the cuff. Definitely not a well planned advertisement if that's what it was supposed to be.
I've had customers that have used these guys with about a 50/50 success rate at getting 100% data back. The times they couldn't get the data were due to head crashes that had scrapped the platters clean.
It never seems to fail, customer declares they absolutely don't need backups for their workstations, they
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Good to know. So just their PR sucks. Actually, that may be an indicator that their work is not too bad, because the crooks rely on PR to get new customers, while those that actually get results can rely in part on repeat business.
WTF? I thought I had ads diabled?? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is this stupid marketing BS still displayed?
What the hell is with the transcription? (Score:2)
SEE my SIG (Score:2)
This stuff isn't It's not easy,and the costs can go rediculously through the roof. Having done a TINY bit myself, shipping out some work, etc..
See my Sig though, it's all right there.
spamdot? (Score:3)
We can flag comments as spam, but not "stories" such as this. Hmm.
Why pretend (Score:2)
Perhaps Slashdot should follow Fark's lead and put a "sponsored" flag on stories like these and disable commenting? That way it would be clear that the story was an advertisement and they could avoid alienating their user base. Slashvertisements are usually fairly obvious and when they do appear the comments tend to all be very negative against whatever was being advertised. This way Slashdot could get their ad money for the promotion without pissing of the readers and filling the comments with vitriol.
LOL DR Chipper Shredder (Score:4)
I doubt after your hard drive goes through a chipper/shredder that they could recover the data.
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It's doable in theory, but prohibitively expensive. The only people with the knowledge would be the drive designers, and they'd need to spend weeks working with access to the type of cleanroom that makes an operating theater dirty.
DIY (Score:2)
While DIY data recovery has its risks, most "damaged" disks really just have minor filesystem corruption.
The wonderful (free) photorec tool from the photorec package can be used to do an amazing amount of recovery. I've never had it fail on SD cards with FAT32 damage. It can also recover all sorts of other document formats, despite the name, and works fine on hard drives - though you should *ALWAYS* disk image the drive and then attempt recovery on the image.
For imaging, look into ddrescue, it's a vital fir
Form option to destroy hard drive (Score:2)
If I was that company I would make people write "I WANT YOU TO DESTROY THIS HARD DRIVE" before I would destroy it.
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One hopes with this extra source of funds Slashdot might hire some editors.
I know you're joking, we all know that /. is powered by dupes and nonsensical editorial write-ups.
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It depends on if the controller is good and if the platter(s) are damaged.
All the software in the world won't fix a bad armature, controller, motor, though a platter can ,if lucky, be read a gazillion times and bit for bit avgd to try and sum up what the original bit shouldhave been. EAC uses a similar things to get audio from damaged CD's
I attempted to fix a fullsize portable backup drive that was 'Knocked" when the poor thing was knocked off the counter onto a tile floor. It got hit just right, slamed
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That, or at least some video of cool tools and a description of the process, rather than simple claims of what they can do. Show a water damaged drive, show how they get it spinning, show how they read data --- that would have been interesting even if it required an investment beyond what the average user would make.
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We really need a way to exclude video stories. Also, where do I sign up to buy a front page story?
I generally visit slashdot at work, and I'm not some cool graphic designer who's allowed to sit there all day playing music through his headphones and not answering the phone. So I skip past any video link/story anyway.
At least they've started doing transcripts of interviews now.
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Sucks that I'll forever only have a few mostly crappy photos of my wedding reception
I find it hard to believe that nowadays you wouldn't have hundreds of reasonable quality mobile phone pictures from pretty much everyone who attended. Granted, they might not be professiional level, but does that really matter?
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Surely it would be better from their point of view if the public thought that just disconnecting the hard drive made it somehow unreadable?