Case Studies

Experts succeeded in resolving a very spectacular case of data rescue in Vienna: a man dropped his PC full of illegal materials into a river - data reconstructed

Author: Dipl. Ing. Nicolas Ehrschwendner
Friday 29th of May 2009 at 10:55 am

In the special laboratory of Attingo Data Rescue in Vienna a very spectacular case of data rescue was resolved. A man who is suspected of crime in a northern european country did try to get rid of his computer full of illegal materials in a very elegant way: he dropped the machine to the bottom of a river and the PC lay there unnoticed for two months. Only then the already completely destroyed machine could be retrieved by divers and transported to the engineers in the special lab of Attingo Data Rescue in Vienna.

"The hard disk was covered with sand and mud and the electronic wires suffered badly from corrosion", says Nicolas Ehrschwendner about the machine's terrible condition. "In cases like these one cannot be very hopefull anymore about the possibilities of reconstructing any data." But the technicians never gave up: the dirty, wet magnetic disks had to be cleansed in the clean room lab by way of a special procedure. One should remember that the write-read heads are situated only a few nanometers below surface and that the disks themselves do turn around up to 250 times per second. This means for the technicians that they have to work very hard, Ehrschwendner explains: "Every spot of dirt, even an infinite small one, can in these circumstances trigger the fatal crash." After several days and by way of massive procedures the specialists succeeded in isolating important parts and to read these in a special setting. After that all data could be handed to the police authorities. Now they form evidence in court.

About Attingo Attingo Data Rescue is a european enterprise for data rescue situated in Vienna, Hamburg and Amsterdam. In the clean room laboratory data from wiped, formatted or mechanically defect data media can be reconstructed.
	About the author DI. Nicolas Ehrschwendner is the founder and manager of Attingo Data Rescue in Vienna and specialist in datasecurity and datareconstruction. Info: www.attingo.com

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