On Jan 19, 2023, at 9:47 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk
<cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
On Fri, 20 Jan 2023, Chris via cctalk wrote:
Now this ia going to sound naive, but could't
every law firm and attorney general in the country be informed of the possibility of
retrieving data from old disks? And their volatility? And what to and not to do with an
old disk until it's put in the hands of someone that could retrieve data?
Now what if the case is that you have a disk, but know absolutely nothing about it. Is
there a swiss army knife, something like a GW that'll handle it?
REMEMBER AND DO NOT FORGET. YOU VERY WELL MAY GET ONLY 1 SHOT AT RETRIEVING IT'S
CONTENTS.
There's alao optical methods used by the FBI.
I tend to not be impressed by the technical prowess of the FBI.
I haven't worked with them, but I remember getting into a discussion with a state
police agency some years ago, who had acquired one of our SAN arrays as evidence in some
case they were working. I was asked to help them.
They wanted to know about the BIOS settings and whether the RAID was "left to
right" or "right to left". They got very annoyed when I told them the
product has no BIOS and isn't either left to right or right to left, but identifies
the drives according to labels written on them at setup time. And in any case, since
it's a virtual LUN device the RAID layout was the least of their problems.
In the end they stopped asking questions; apparently the whole thing was much too
difficult for them to grok. I suspect they never got any data off that system.
I suspect there's more skill in other places, but what struck me most was the
unwillingness to accept answers and teching from people who know what they are talking
about.
paul