I have Brian Carrier's File System Forensics Analysis and was just wondering could i teach myself everything in this book without needing the help of another person, as i want to gain a good understanding of file systems before i start my computer forensics course.
Thanks
You probably could if you worked at it -)
I would suggest that you get hold of some sample disk images ( small examples for testing forensic tools are available from several places on the web ) and play with these using your tools alongside the book.
However if you are going on a course, it would make sense to read the book now and experiment a bit, but not kill yourself over trying to self teach, seeing as you are going to be taught it again anyway ….
A good fun thing to try is to do some 'magic' on a file that you or someone else has deleted. You can recover the data even though it has been 'deleted'. When you recover it using some of the simple tools you have you'll feel like a magician. And if you can show your non-techie friends then you will get a few 'Whoa! I didn't know you could do that!"
It's also a good way to learn the basics.
Another thing that helped(and still is) is to offer to fix people's machines if they have viruses and or malware or if they have accidentally deleted stuff. It means you get to play with lots of different setups and perhaps file systems. And helps you to get used to using live cds and the like to view data/file systems whilst modifying them as little as possible.