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 [jet blue bathroom] Data recovered from Columbia disaster: Jon Edwards often manages what appears impossible He has recovered precious data from computers wrecked in floods and fires and dumped in lakes Now Edwards may have set a new standard He found information on a melted disk drive that fell from the sky when space shuttle Columbia disintegrated in 2003 quot When we got it it was two hunks of metal stuck together We couldn t even tell it was a hard drive It was burned and the edges were melted quot said Edwards an engineer at Kroll Ontrack Inc outside Minneapolis Minnesota quot It looked pretty bad at first glance but we always give it a shot quot During Columbia s fateful mission the drive had been used to store data from a scientific experiment on the properties of liquid xenon Most of the information was radioed to Earth during Columbia s voyage Edwards was able to recover the remainder allowing researchers to publish the experiment in the April issue of a science journal Physical Review E That led Kroll Ontrack to share details of its salvage effort Columbia broke apart during re-entry into the atmosphere February 1 2003 killing its seven astronauts The shuttle had been damaged at launch by foam insulation that fell off an external fuel tank Like other Columbia debris the mangled disk drive turned up in Texas It was six months after the disaster when a NASA contractor sent the drive to Kroll Ontrack which specializes in data recovery Edwards had reason for pessimism Not only were the drive s metal and plastic elements scorched but the seal on the side that keeps out dirt and dust also had melted That made the drive vulnerable to particles that can scratch the tiny materials embedded inside destroying their ability to retain data in endless 0s or 1s depending on their magnetic charge However at the core of the drive the spinning metal platters that actually store data were not warped They had been gouged and pitted but the 340-megabyte drive was only half full and the damage happened where data had not been written Edwards attributes that to a lucky twist The computer was running an ancient operating system DOS which does not scatter data all over drives as other approaches do After cleaning the platters with a chemical solution Edwards used them in a newly built drive The process — two days from start to finish —

 [shingo2008.blogr.com - Blog (RSS 2.0)] Hard Drive Data From Space Shuttle Colum...: Kroll Ontrack data-recovery engineer Jon Edwards told the AP that the drive had melted before landing with other debris in Texas, but the drive was only half full and since the astronauts had used DOS the data was not scattered. The portion of the drive containing the data was not damaged and Edwards recovered almost all of the data.

[Data Recovery Strategies By Data Recovery Expert Jaison Jacob] Hard Disk Data Recovery Specialists - I Didn’t Back Up, Now What?: Now Edwards may have set a new standard: He found information on a melted disk drive that fell from the sky when space shuttle Columbia disintegrated in 2003. “When we got it, it was two hunks of metal stuck together.

Reflected tags on Technorati: Blog, Ontrack Data, Data Recovery Reports