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]