This is just a word of caution for anyone throwing away, donating or otherwise discarding a computer or hard disk. You may think that your data was removed with a format but you are mistaken. There are many free and easy to use forensic recovery tools that can be used to recover your data. Case in point I found a 20 GB hard disk at the dump in the swap shed. I plugged the drive into my garage/utility computer and began examining the drive. The first thing I noted is there was no partition table and several bad sectors (likely the reason for it being discarded). Being it was a parallel ATA drive I assumed that it was a PC based drive and began recovery using a tool called testdisk on in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (CNC). This tool can recover otherwise deleted partition tables from a variety of systems. I tend to use Linux for tasks like this to reduce the risk of infection from viruses and it can be done with a Live CD if necessary.
Month: July 2014
Open Ayer Space forums now open…
Faisal has created a Google+ Group for Open Ayer Space and registered the domain http://openayerspace.org/. I had suggested this name based on my private makerspace and it works on so many levels:
- Openness promotes ideas and sharing
- Ayer and Shirley are nearby each other and the (A)yer (S)pace plays on this
- It opens a whole theme for the workspace (aka, Hanger, Admirals Lounge, Cockpit etc.)
Currently the google groups is by invite. Contact Faisal for more information.
Faisal is also planning a booth at the Ayer Fourth of July celebration with a table setup to charge cellphones and discuss the new makerspace.