Our first local 'dead' hard disk acquisition

We've imaged lots of removable media over the past year (~ 400, according to Victoria's stats), and I've also done a  fair amount of forensic imaging of material on-site with donors (live acquisition) . One aspect of our 'forensic' armoury that has not been subject to so much testing is the imaging of whole hard disks at BEAM. So-called 'dead' acquisitions.

In the past few months two new accessions have presented us with an additional four hard disks. This is excellent news, as I have finally had the chance to use our forensic computer's Ultrabay (write-blocking device) to image a real 'collection hard disk'. Everything went smoothly. So far so good.

Disk imaging for older floppies

Thanks to Michael Olson for the link to Kryoflux , which is currently being developed by the Software Preservation Society (an organisation established to preserve disk-based computer games). Stanford are also using the Catweasel floppy disk controller; see Stanford's post on Catweasel and the Catweasel site itself. These could be handy to have around when we receive more in the way of unusual floppy formats.

ntfsprogs

I imagine nothing new to you folks, but handy all the same.

http://man.linux-ntfs.org/

and in particular:

http://man.linux-ntfs.org/ntfsclone.8.html