Date: 11/12/05 (Computer Geeks)    Keywords: ebay

I used Knoppix to recover Laptop computer they "never backed up".
LJ Cut because I put 3 photos in the post.

Some one at work has a Laptop computer they never backed up.
They traveled 1000 miles to give a presentation, using the laptop…
The hard drive got fried and all there photos and movies, lectures were on it.

I told them to let me try to recover the stuff.
I tried but no luck the drive was “dead“ worked 3 days but no way.
I bought 2 matching drives like the “dead“ drive ( 20GB IBM IDE.) on eBay.
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I tried moving the circuit boards a few times, some times the board fails.
I moved the disk platters from "bad drive" to a working drive and recovered all most all the data.
Then practiced a lot , moving platters in and out of one drive.
Not “all” data because the old drive has bad sectors and bad spots…
I first practiced on 2 old 160 Meg drives (cost 2 dollars each) then practiced on
a “dead“ drive identical to the bad one.
Cost = 7 dollars , then did it for real….took a good hard drive apart
(cost 32 dollars) and put the hard drive disk platters from the “dead“ drive..
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I made a clean "room" on my desk and used T5 to T 9 star /torrex drivers and snap ring tools to disassemble the drives. I got 2 160 Meg drives to take part and move the platters first.
put some files on one and then see it the cables, BIOS, computer and drives all worked together.
so when I did it "for real" I would know it worked once.
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Then booted with Knoppix 3.9 and coped files to my 10 Gig slave drive,
then from the slave to my 200 Gig File server…now I made Cds with the files …
Make the target drive fat 32 or ext2 /ext3 , not NTFS, you cant relibly write to NTFS.
I used Knoppix to copy the files.
The GUI part, I needed to see the file structure.
I made 3 passes before the drive started making noise..
Now making 6 or 8 Cds with the files to give them the files.
I am dancing…..used Knoppix and my 200 Gig File server made w *.nix floppy.
Computer Forensics is a hobby for now, some day I will do Forensic Analysis for real....

Source: http://www.livejournal.com/community/computergeeks/815610.html