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Data from shuttle Columbia hard drive recovered
Five years after the shuttle Columbia crashed on re-entry into the earth’s atmosphere, data recovery experts at Kroll Ontrack Inc. managed to recover data from a 400-megabyte Seagate hard drive that was on board.
The cracked component was discovered six months after the crash in a dried-up lake bed. But the data recovery team was still able to retrieve 99 percent of the stored information, Computerworld.com said.
A science journal in April published results of tests performed by astronauts on xexon gas which were stored on the hard drive.
If they are that durable, I’m going to take a hammer to the next hard drive I get rid of so no one gets my personal data, even if I think it’s broken.
There’s a slideshow of the damaged hard drive on the Computerworld site. Below is one of the images.
Comments
By Full Metal Jacket
May 9, 2008 7:13 PM | Link to this
Four and a half years to recover information on a hard drive. Sounds to me like Kroll Ontrack Inc. was bilking NASA for as much $$ as they could. If you want my opinion the black box should have been given to the FAA Investigators. They have a pretty good track record of recovering that information from airline crashes within a few days to weeks… not years.
By FF Brian
May 10, 2008 11:21 AM | Link to this
I don’t think they are talking about the black box, but a hard drive on one of the many computers they store data from all the science experiments they conduct. I doubt it had the same protection as the black box. If so that was one tough hard drive.
By Alan
May 11, 2008 4:26 PM | Link to this
Read the article, Full Metal Jacket. It took them only two days to recover the data. The disk’s existence is only coming to light now, because the scientific data recovered from disk is being published in some scientific journal. No conspiracy to hide the recovered data, no bilking of the government, nothing - it’s just the fact that the disk had survived at all has finally hit the mass media.