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Parallel ATA (PATA), originally AT Attachment, also known as IDE, is a standard interface designed for IBM PC-compatible computers. It was first developed by Western Digital and Compaq in 1986 for compatible hard drives and CD or DVD drives. The connection is used for storage devices such as hard disk drives, floppy disk drives, and optical disc drives in computers.
A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk, is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating platters coated with magnetic material. The platters are paired with magnetic heads, usually arranged on a moving actuator arm, which read and write data to the platter surfaces. Data is accessed in a random-access manner, meaning that individual blocks of data can be stored and retrieved in any order. HDDs are a type of non-volatile storage, retaining stored data when powered off. Modern HDDs are typically in the form of a small rectangular box.
Disk partitioning or disk slicing is the creation of one or more regions on secondary storage, so that each region can be managed separately. These regions are called partitions. It is typically the first step of preparing a newly installed disk, before any file system is created. The disk stores the information about the partitions' locations and sizes in an area known as the partition table that the operating system reads before any other part of the disk. Each partition then appears to the operating system as a distinct "logical" disk that uses part of the actual disk. System administrators use a program called a partition editor to create, resize, delete, and manipulate the partitions. Partitioning allows the use of different filesystems to be installed for different kinds of files. Separating user data from system data can prevent the system partition from becoming full and rendering the system unusable. Partitioning can also make backing up easier. A disadvantage is that it can be difficult to properly size partitions, resulting in having one partition with too much free space and another nearly totally allocated.
A disk image is a snapshot of a storage device's structure and data typically stored in one or more computer files on another storage device. Traditionally, disk images were bit-by-bit copies of every sector on a hard disk often created for digital forensic purposes, but it is now common to only copy allocated data to reduce storage space. Compression and deduplication are commonly used to reduce the size of the image file set. Disk imaging is done for a variety of purposes including digital forensics, cloud computing, system administration, as part of a backup strategy, and legacy emulation as part of a digital preservation strategy. Disk images can be made in a variety of formats depending on the purpose. Virtual disk images are intended to be used for cloud computing, ISO images are intended to emulate optical media and RAW disk images are used for forensic purposes. Proprietary formats are typically used by disk imaging software. Despite the benefits of disk imaging the storage costs can be high, management can be difficult and they can be time consuming to create.
NTLDR is the boot loader for all releases of Windows NT operating system from 1993 with the release of Windows NT 3.1 up until Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. From Windows Vista onwards it was replaced by the BOOTMGR bootloader. NTLDR is typically run from the primary storage device, but it can also run from portable storage devices such as a CD-ROM, USB flash drive, or floppy disk. NTLDR can also load a non NT-based operating system given the appropriate boot sector in a file.
Disk formatting is the process of preparing a data storage device such as a hard disk drive, solid-state drive, floppy disk, memory card or USB flash drive for initial use. In some cases, the formatting operation may also create one or more new file systems. The first part of the formatting process that performs basic medium preparation is often referred to as "low-level formatting". Partitioning is the common term for the second part of the process, dividing the device into several sub-devices and, in some cases, writing information to the device allowing an operating system to be booted from it. The third part of the process, usually termed "high-level formatting" most often refers to the process of generating a new file system. In some operating systems all or parts of these three processes can be combined or repeated at different levels and the term "format" is understood to mean an operation in which a new disk medium is fully prepared to store files. Some formatting utilities allow distinguishing between a quick format, which does not erase all existing data and a long option that does erase all existing data.
A live CD is a complete bootable computer installation including operating system which runs directly from a CD-ROM or similar storage device into a computer's memory, rather than loading from a hard disk drive. A live CD allows users to run an operating system for any purpose without installing it or making any changes to the computer's configuration. Live CDs can run on a computer without secondary storage, such as a hard disk drive, or with a corrupted hard disk drive or file system, allowing data recovery.
Disk cloning is the process of duplicating all data on a digital storage drive, such as a hard disk or solid state drive, using hardware or software techniques. Unlike file copying, disk cloning also duplicates the filesystems, partitions, drive meta data and slack space on the drive. Common reasons for cloning a drive include; data backup and recovery; duplicating a computer's configuration for mass deployment and for preserving data for digital forensics purposes. Drive cloning can be used in conjunction with drive imaging where the cloned data is saved to one or more files on another drive rather than copied directly to another drive.
In computing, data recovery is a process of retrieving deleted, inaccessible, lost, corrupted, damaged, or formatted data from secondary storage, removable media or files, when the data stored in them cannot be accessed in a usual way. The data is most often salvaged from storage media such as internal or external hard disk drives (HDDs), solid-state drives (SSDs), USB flash drives, magnetic tapes, CDs, DVDs, RAID subsystems, and other electronic devices. Recovery may be required due to physical damage to the storage devices or logical damage to the file system that prevents it from being mounted by the host operating system (OS).
In computing, a hybrid drive is a logical or physical storage device that combines a faster storage medium such as solid-state drive (SSD) with a higher-capacity hard disk drive (HDD). The intent is adding some of the speed of SSDs to the cost-effective storage capacity of traditional HDDs. The purpose of the SSD in a hybrid drive is to act as a cache for the data stored on the HDD, improving the overall performance by keeping copies of the most frequently used data on the faster SSD drive.
TestDisk is a free and open-source data recovery utility that helps users recover lost partitions or repair corrupted filesystems. TestDisk can collect detailed information about a corrupted drive, which can then be sent to a technician for further analysis. TestDisk supports DOS, Microsoft Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, SunOS, and MacOS. TestDisk handles non-partitioned and partitioned media. In particular, it recognizes the GUID Partition Table (GPT), Apple partition map, PC/Intel BIOS partition tables, Sun Solaris slice and Xbox fixed partitioning scheme. TestDisk uses a command line user interface. TestDisk can recover deleted files with 97% accuracy.
Automatic acoustic management (AAM) is a method for reducing acoustic emanations in AT Attachment (ATA) mass storage devices for computer data storage, such as ATA hard disk drives and ATAPI optical disc drives. AAM is an optional feature set for ATA/ATAPI devices; when a device supports AAM, the acoustic management parameters are adjustable through a software or firmware user interface.
The Sleuth Kit (TSK) is a library and collection of Unix- and Windows-based utilities for extracting data from disk drives and other storage so as to facilitate the forensic analysis of computer systems. It forms the foundation for Autopsy, a better known tool that is essentially a graphical user interface to the command line utilities bundled with The Sleuth Kit.
The host protected area (HPA) is an area of a hard drive or solid-state drive that is not normally visible to an operating system. It was first introduced in the ATA-4 standard CXV (T13) in 2001.
A forensic disk controller or hardware write-block device is a specialized type of computer hard disk controller made for the purpose of gaining read-only access to computer hard drives without the risk of damaging the drive's contents. The device is named forensic because its most common application is for use in investigations where a computer hard drive may contain evidence. Such a controller historically has been made in the form of a dongle that fits between a computer and an IDE or SCSI hard drive, but with the advent of USB and SATA, forensic disk controllers supporting these newer technologies have become widespread. Steve Bress and Mark Menz invented hard drive write blocking.
Data erasure is a software-based method of overwriting the data that aims to completely destroy all electronic data residing on a hard disk drive or other digital media by using zeros and ones to overwrite data onto all sectors of the device in an irreversible process. By overwriting the data on the storage device, the data is rendered irrecoverable and achieves data sanitization.
Forensic Toolkit, or FTK, is a computer forensics software made by AccessData. It scans a hard drive looking for various information. It can, for example, potentially locate deleted emails and scan a disk for text strings to use them as a password dictionary to crack encryption.
A master boot record (MBR) is a special type of boot sector at the very beginning of partitioned computer mass storage devices like fixed disks or removable drives intended for use with IBM PC-compatible systems and beyond. The concept of MBRs was publicly introduced in 1983 with PC DOS 2.0.
Advanced Format (AF) is any disk sector format used to store data on magnetic disks in hard disk drives (HDDs) that exceeds 512, 520, or 528 bytes per sector, such as the 4096, 4112, 4160, and 4224-byte (4 KB) sectors of an Advanced Format Drive (AFD). Larger sectors enable the integration of stronger error correction algorithms to maintain data integrity at higher storage densities.
ATATool is freeware software that is used to display and modify ATA disk information from a Microsoft Windows environment. The software is typically used to manage host protected area (HPA) and device configuration overlay (DCO) features and is broadly similar to the hdparm for Linux. The software can also be used to generate and sometimes repair bad sectors. Recent versions include support for DCO restore and freeze operations, HPA security (password) operations and simulated bad sectors.
References
- ↑ Brian Carrier (2005). File System Forensic Analysis. Addison Wesley. p. 38. ISBN 0321268172.
- ↑ Mark K. Rogers; Mayank R. Gupta; Michael D. Hoeschele (September 2006). "Hidden Disk Areas: HPA and DCO" (PDF).
- ↑ Data Synergy UK (July 2015). "ATATool - Data Synergy Windows HPA/DCO Utility".
- ↑ National Institute of Justice (October 2008). "NIJ Test Results for Digital Data Acquisition Tool: EnCase LinEn 6.01" (PDF). p. 5.
- ↑ National Institute of Justice (June 2008). "NIJ Test Results for Digital Data Acquisition Tool: FTK Imager 2.5.3.14" (PDF). p. 6.