Very Very Old Hard Drive

Ehdevlin · 2014-08-14T08:49:38Z

I receive a request from a lawyer for a firm that I do lot of forensic work for. It was one of those odd questions that you get when you are in a clients office on another matter, and they all of a sudden remember this issue.Here is the scenario… His father passed away in 1994 (father was also a lawyer), and they took the items from his office and stored them in his parents garage. His mother passed away recently and while cleaning out the garage, he came across his dad's old work computer. The family is currently involved in a mineral rights law suit over some land that has been in their family for more than 50 years. The son believes that documents pertaining to this mineral rights issue could be on this drive, and has asked me to take a look.The drive is a very old Maxtor Drive total size of 160mb. The drive actually looks to be in really good shape. I attempted to mount the drive on my forensic machine and it spun up (and actually sounds good) but my machine does not recognize the drive at all. I have tried it on forensic machines in my firm that run Windows 7 and Windows 8, and just for kicks plugged it into one of our iMac's with a portable writeblocker. One of my partners has suggested that we try a linux machine…which is our next step…..any suggestions? The lawyer believes his dad was running Windows, which at that time would have been Windows 3.1 (i know it was just a shell). This is an actually important question to me, because besides this case, I also work with a team on unsolved Cold Case Homicides, and many of our investigations are from this span of time and this may become relevant to that area.

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l0ft1369

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19/08/2014 9:48 pm

Are you using a USB shuttle? I know that seems like a silly thing to ask, but I've had a few problems with those things, like I think some will only take a drive if it's set to slave, or master or whatever. But they sometimes don't behave in a way you'd expect them to.

Also seeing as how it's only 160MB are you going to dump it in both directions?

-l0ft

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