Case File Library · Volume Seventeen

Cases 801–850

Volume Seventeen runs from the practical to the irreversible. Forty-Six more real recoveries: an insurer who kept the machine and returned only the drive, a disk reporting no capacity at all, a drive that blue-screens the computer that opens it, a rugged drive whose rating never covered the port the water came through, an owner who had already swapped the enclosure and settled the question himself, a camera that could not format the card and thereby saved a thousand photographs, two mirror disks damaged by one fall, and a doctoral thesis behind a check disk crawling at a sector every five seconds. Every case is a genuine enquiry, its identifying details changed or removed, its lesson kept whole. Every recovery names its instruments: the ACE Lab PC-3000 Express with Data Extractor and PC-3000 Flash with Spider Board, MRT Ultra, Atola TaskForce 2 and Atola Insight Forensic, DeepSpar USB Stabilizer 10Gb and RapidSpar, the Rusolut Visual NAND Reconstructor, Flash Extractor, Passware Kit Forensic, and OSForensics. The volume closes on the backup that was almost complete.