examing disk platters was Re: Microscopes

Please don't use paragraph-length lines. Compensating manually, Well, others have posted reasons why a visible-light microscope is unlikely to help, possibly except for fairly old disks - and be very tedious even then. But it occurs to me that "data is stored magnetically" is not, by itself, reason to think an optical microscope can't do it. It would not surprise me a bit if magnetic domain orientation led to some kind of reflected-visible-light anisotropy, depending of course on the material and the orientations in question and such. After all, light is an electromagnetic phenomenon, and, as such, could plausibly interact with a magnetic field. (In particular, it would not surprise me if there were polarization effects.) /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B