Info Recovered From Scorched Hard Drive Helps Fill In
Blanks
When the shuttle Columbia tragically
broke apart on reentry in 2003, killing its crew of seven, few
believed that much, if anything could be recovered. The intense
heat of reentry combined with a massive debris field over the Texas
and Arkansas border made the chances recovering anything nearly
impossible.
Five years later, the impossible was made possible when
scientific data was successfully recovered from a hard drive that
barely survived the disaster.
"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," said Jon Edwards, an engineer at Kroll Ontrack Inc.,
a data recovery company to the Associated Press. "It looked pretty
bad at first glance, but we always give it a shot."
The drive was sent to Kroll Ontrack six months after it was
found in Texas like most of the Columbia debris. The company is
used to recovering information from computers involved in fires,
floods, or other disasters... but the drive from Columbia presented
a unique challenge.
The drive's metal and plastic elements were scorched, and the
seal on the side that keeps out dirt and dust had melted. With it
gone, the drive was vulnerable to scratches and damage from
particles entering the case and destroying the ability of the drive
to retain data.
Luckily the core elements of the 340mb drive, the metal disks
that store data, were not warped. There was damage to certain parts
of the disks, but most occurring in areas where data had not been
stored since it was only half full.
Additionally, since the computer used in the experiments was
running the comparatively-ancient DOS operating system, data was
easier to recover. Unlike more modern operating systems, DOS
doesn't scatter data over multiple sectors in a drive.
After cleaning and reinstallation into a newly built drive,
Ontrack's Edwards was able to recover 99 percent of the data within
two days, start to finish.
Proving how difficult the recovery process was, Edwards remarks
he attempted a similar process on two other drives recovered from
Columbia, but they were damaged beyond recovery by the inferno of
the reentry.
The data was from an experiment on the properties of liquid
xenon. Though most of the data from the experiment was radioed to
Earth during Columbia's final voyage, the data within the drive was
critical to fill in the final details. As a result, researchers
were able to publish the experiment in the April issue of science
journal, Physical Review E.