Hard drive from space shuttle Columbia salvaged with data intact

This is insane. The hard drive crashed to earth with the rest of the wreckage, and at first they couldn’t even tell it was a drive at all. Data recovery expert Jon Edwards took a shot at it and due to a combination of technical skill and luck, he was able to recover the data on the drive, which was information on an experiment written up here.

I say luck because whatever was writing to the hard drive happened to be running DOS of all things, which applies the data to the drive in a very straightforward way. It’s unnerving that after such a trauma they were able to recover all the data, but it’s also reassuring. With all my hard drives, I live in constant fear of fire or flood (well, not flood here on the second floor, but you know what I mean). It’s good to know there are experts who can fix a drive that’s fallen from 39 miles up at 12,000mph.

Too bad it doesn’t mention what brand of HDD it is. [via HardOCP]