On May 10, 12:49*pm, Jim Chandler wrote:
Too_Many_Tools wrote:
FYI...I found the story very interesting.
Also check out the link for the picture of the drive in question.
TMT
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080509/...recovered_data
Data from Columbia disk drives survived the shuttle accident By BRIAN
BERGSTEIN, AP Technology Writer
Fri May 9, 6:40 PM ET
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.
"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 Edwards, an engineer at Kroll Ontrack Inc., outside
Minneapolis. "It looked pretty bad at first glance, but we always give
it a shot."
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 on Feb. 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 yet 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 — captured 99 percent of the drive's information.
Edwards was gratified.
And to drive home just what a long shot his recovery had been, he
later had no success with two other drives found in Columbia's
wreckage. Blasted by the unfathomable furnace of entry into the
atmosphere, their metals had lost the ability to hold a magnetic
charge.
___
On the Net:
NASA write-up of the experiment whose data was recovered:
http://tinyurl.com/44nqgv
Too bad they couldn't have recovered some of the flight data recorder
data. *I thought that it was interesting that the HD they recovered the
data from used DOS in this day and age.
Jim- Hide quoted text -
- Show quoted text -
I noted that too.
Actually I remember reading about the software in the Shuttle...using
very old hardware and software.
The DOS usage likely tells us when that subsystem was developed..which
is much newer than most of the Shuttle. ;)
This country has been coasting for a long time on old space technology
and it is coming back to bite us.
TMT