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_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

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

On Sat, 10 May 2008 14:05:38 -0700 (PDT), Too_Many_Tools
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
From the article it sounds like that disk drive was an experiment
controller and data collector. For that purpose, DOS would be a pretty
darned good choice. It is very light weight, allowing it to run on
minimal hardware, and is reasonably robust. Since the OS doesn't limit
a program's access to hardware, it is easy to write experiment control
and data acquistion programs. The problem these days would be in
finding hardware that DOS will run on, which is one reason that Linux
has become popular for this and similar purposes.

It isn't clear to me that the experiment computer ran DOS. All I can
be certain of from the article is that the disk was recorded using a
DOS file system.

Too_Many_Tools wrote:

This country has been coasting for a long time on old space technology
and it is coming back to bite us.

There are a lot of data tapes rotting way in archives because we don't have
the technology to read them anymore.

WEs
--
"Additionally as a security officer, I carry a gun to protect
government officials but my life isn't worth protecting at home
in their eyes." Dick Anthony Heller

Jim Levie writes:

On Sat, 10 May 2008 14:05:38 -0700 (PDT), Too_Many_Tools
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
From the article it sounds like that disk drive was an experiment
controller and data collector. For that purpose, DOS would be a pretty
darned good choice. It is very light weight, allowing it to run on
minimal hardware, and is reasonably robust. Since the OS doesn't limit
a program's access to hardware, it is easy to write experiment control
and data acquistion programs. The problem these days would be in
finding hardware that DOS will run on, which is one reason that Linux
has become popular for this and similar purposes.

It isn't clear to me that the experiment computer ran DOS. All I can
be certain of from the article is that the disk was recorded using a
DOS file system.

There is an argument for something like DOS & for FAT filesystems for
some classes of applications and there are plenty of x86 variations
suitable to run soemthing like DOS. Even if it was old hardware, the
last thing you want to do is start upgrading stuff before you really
need to- where need is defined as something like "if we don't the device
is more likely to fail than if we do".

The Constellation stuff, being a new engineering effort is not
constrained to use the older stuff- and a conscious effort is being made
to modernize systems and protocols accordingly.

Gregm

I guess you don't understand the millions of hours of unit testing it
takes to clear a program or o.s. DOS was not all that different in
ability to what they had before - the DEC equipment. You don't want
a lot of junk running in the background like windows has and LINUX
is not yet mature for space and life and death actions.

Martin
Martin H. Eastburn
@ home at Lions' Lair with our computer lionslair at consolidated dot net
TSRA, Endowed; NRA LOH & Patron Member, Golden Eagle, Patriot's Medal.
NRA Second Amendment Task Force Charter Founder
IHMSA and NRA Metallic Silhouette maker & member.
http://lufkinced.com/


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


----== Posted via Pronews.Com - Unlimited-Unrestricted-Secure Usenet News==----
http://www.pronews.com The #1 Newsgroup Service in the World! 100,000 Newsgroups
---= - Total Privacy via Encryption =---

On May 10, 6:14*pm, Wes wrote:
Too_Many_Tools wrote:
This country has been coasting for a long time on old space technology
and it is coming back to bite us.

There are a lot of data tapes rotting way in archives because we don't have
the technology to read them anymore.

WEs
--
"Additionally as a security officer, I carry a gun to protect
government officials but my life isn't worth protecting at home
in their eyes." *Dick Anthony Heller

And the technology is not there because the money was not spent when
it should have.

Irreplaceable data from many space programs have been lost because the
government will not allot the money for transferring the information
from the older media to the newer media.

Recently NASA was going to shut down the Martian rovers because they
didn't want to spend a couple million...public outcry made them change
their minds quickly.

The same goes for the Hubble telescope...they were going to abandon it
until the word got out and pressure was applied by the public.

In the future, I expect to see the Chinese on the moon...and while
America watches.

TMT

On May 10, 7:06*pm, Greg Menke wrote:
Jim Levie writes:
On Sat, 10 May 2008 14:05:38 -0700 (PDT), Too_Many_Tools
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
From the article it sounds like that disk drive was an experiment
controller and data collector. For that purpose, DOS would be a pretty
darned good choice. It is very light weight, allowing it to run on
minimal hardware, and is reasonably robust. Since the OS doesn't limit
a program's access to hardware, it is easy to write experiment control
and data acquistion programs. The problem these days would be in
finding hardware that DOS will run on, which is one reason that Linux
has become popular for this and similar purposes.

It isn't clear to me that the experiment computer ran DOS. All I can
be certain of from the article is that the disk was recorded using a
DOS file system.

There is an argument for something like DOS & for FAT filesystems for
some classes of applications and there are plenty of x86 variations
suitable to run soemthing like DOS. *Even if it was old hardware, the
last thing you want to do is start upgrading stuff before you really
need to- where need is defined as something like "if we don't the device
is more likely to fail than if we do".

The Constellation stuff, being a new engineering effort is not
constrained to use the older stuff- and a conscious effort is being made
to modernize systems and protocols accordingly.

Gregm- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

True...and they are having a devil of a time trying to recapture much
of the old Apollo information...they have been scrouging in lots of
junkyards looking for old equipment to reverse engineer.

TMT

In article
,
Too_Many_Tools wrote:

In the future, I expect to see the Chinese on the moon...and while
America watches.

The chinese will have no trouble getting to the moon. They probably
have no plans for a return trip, there are lots of chinese

Free men own guns - www(dot)geocities(dot)com/CapitolHill/5357/

Too_Many_Tools wrote:

In the future, I expect to see the Chinese on the moon...and while
America watches.

On Chinese teevees.

Wes

Steve Ackman wrote:
In 97mVj.1864$T1.1192@trnddc01, on Sat, 10 May 2008 18:49:41 GMT, Jim
Chandler, wrote:


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.


Um, hello? DOS has and needs defragmentation tools.
"Other approaches" don't.


Has? Yes. Needs? No. There is no requirement for defragmentation
for FAT file system. It's for conviniency and access speed only.
But what are other approaches that need the defragmentation? I
could only remember RT-11 filesystem where it could became a must.

A.

Steve Ackman wrote:
In , on Mon, 12 May 2008
19:23:11 -0700, Zayonc, wrote:

Steve Ackman wrote:

In 97mVj.1864$T1.1192@trnddc01, on Sat, 10 May 2008 18:49:41 GMT, Jim
Chandler, wrote:



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.


Um, hello? DOS has and needs defragmentation tools.
"Other approaches" don't.


Has? Yes. Needs? No. There is no requirement for defragmentation
for FAT file system.


Yes, but in context of Edwards' statement, if DOS
didn't scatter data all over drives, there wouldn't
even *be* defrag tools.

DOS does not scatter data all over driveS - is scatters only
over ONE drive (and another and another... but separately).

It's for conviniency and access speed only.
But what are other approaches that need the defragmentation?


I don't know that any file system will stop working
if not defragged... but certainly FAT and ntfs "scatter
data all over drives?"

If we change word "drives" to singular then - yes. And UFS and
EXT2 and you name it. Any modern file system does scatter data
all over the drive (and some - over the driveS - but definitely
not DOS).

Ok, possible original meaning of the original statement is
already lost...

Steve Ackman writes:

In 97mVj.1864$T1.1192@trnddc01, on Sat, 10 May 2008 18:49:41 GMT, Jim
Chandler, wrote:

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.

Um, hello? DOS has and needs defragmentation tools.
"Other approaches" don't.

If all you're doing is writing data to the disk, it does pretty much
start at one end and fill from there -- which is what I'd expect to
happen if you're recording experimental data. It's when you're doing
mixed creation and deletion that things start getting ugly.

Hmm... I'm trying to think of whether there's anything inherent in
the filesystem (i.e. the actual data structures on disk) that forces
this, or if it's just that the implementations use poor allocation
algorithms?