Hard Disk Failure

[Jeff Kinz]

On Sat, Feb 25, 2006 at 02:40:04AM -0500, aluminumsulfate at earthlink.net wrote:
> 
> I've seen many tools for extracting data from partitions.  But, has
> anyone seen FOSS tools that will let you microstep a drive?  You
> know... move the head and record its signal, so you can recover data
> that's been overwritten....

beware the Oracle.

I have no experience with the internals of a hard drive, but I have done
some low-level programming using the external interface of such devices.


But it has been a while.  I don't recall there being any capabilities to
deliver signal information via the external interface.  That doesn't
mean they don't exist, it just means I didn't come across them in any of
the documentation I saw.

It would actually makes sense for the hard drive internals to be able to
deliver information about what the analog head reads were seeing to the
external interface because it would allow the manufacturer/developers,
or technicians to do really deep, meaningful diagnostics on a drive.

my guess is, that in order to be able to do the types of things you are
describing above, you would have to wire some sensors directly into the
hard drive electronics.  If there are capabilities like the ones you are
asking for which can be accessed through the regular external interface,
then building an open source tool to access that information would be
relatively easy.

The most direct path to building such a tool would be to take the
existing software drivers for a hard drive and add a few more functions
to it that access those particular capabilities.

A long time ago, working on a contract for equipment destined to be
delivered to the NSA I heard a rumor about the procedure that you had to
go through to remove the hard drive from an NSA building:

Basically the drive was disassembled, the "rust" was sanded from the
platters, the platters were shredded, and all of the "rust" and shredded
platter material were placed in a crucible and melted down.the drive can
now be removed from the building.

-- 
Jeff Kinz, Emergent Research, Hudson, MA.
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