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by londons_explore 21 days ago
I would like to see approaches to recovering data from fragile disks by placing the inner disk on a flat surface and using some kind of imaging technology to measure the magnetic fields - perhaps an electron microscope could do the job at low enough field strengths?

Using this I imagine it might be possible to not only read the disk data, but perhaps even previous versions of data that has been overwritten.
1 comments
userbinator 21 days ago
Magnetic field cameras exist:

https://matesy.de/en/products/cmos-magview

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Visualization_of_magnetic...

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rkagerer 21 days ago
Could you use them on a hard disk platter? Is there software out there for recovery of data from a set of platters taken from a bad HDD for which replacement heads / doner drives are not longer available?
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userbinator 20 days ago
Perhaps only a very early hard drive, as 15um is the resolution of those cameras but the latest hard drives have a track pitch around 100nm (0.1um); in any case, in the data recovery industry the usual solution is a spinstand:

https://www.guzik.com/products/head-and-media-disk-drive-tes...

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/4262329

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