My Hard Drive Died!

Scott "Munge & Plunder" Moulton - aka Byte Assassin

Scott Moulton is a master at Data Recovery working for some of the biggest names (crap NDAs). Scott Moulton has created his own training company and teaches his Data Recovery Forensic Class all over the world! Once upon a time he taught his class for SAN formally known as SEC606 Drive and Data Recovery Forensics. You can now catch his class here on the Classes Page.

Scott Moulton is currently writing a book on Data Recovery.  

This talk is the basic process to start doing diagnostics on your damaged hard drive.  The point is to help you determine what the problem is so that you know if it's the board, the heads, media, etc. I will do a shotgun approach to diagnostics by the process of elimination, but more significantly explain when you should STOP before destroying your chance at important data.

For example, if you have a hard drive that you cannot see at all in the BIOS that does not mean it can't be read using something smarter than your motherboard. Yet can you tell if it’s a head problem or a firmware issue? Well, if you know the basics of the "POST" process for a modern drive, you might know that if youcould see a serial number that the head probably read data from thedrive after being instructed to by the firmware. So the real question is, why can't you read the data?

These are the topics I am going to cover from my  experiences in running a successful data recovery company for 10 years. If you are interested in fixing drives, or just a better understanding of how the drive works, then this is the talk you don't want to miss.