Posted on 12/18/2012 7:00:28 AM PST by KansasGirl
Adam Lanza's hard drive, which was found destroyed in his Connecticut home, may be beyond repair police say, leaving them at a loss to explain the shooter's motive.
When police first discovered the tainted hard drive, they believed that it could serve as a key piece of evidence in discovering why a 20-year-old man would terrorize an elementary school filled with children. It appears, however, that the shooter did not want his motive unveiled.
"The computer's hard drive appeared to have been badly damaged with a hammer or screw driver," law enforcement authorities told ABC News on Monday. Two other sources reported to a local Connecticut paper that the hard drive had been in pieces.
"He was eliminating [investigators'] ability to figure out what websites he had gone to or who he might have been communicating with," one investigator told Yahoo.
The little information that police do have confirms that Lanza was an avid player of violent video games.
(Excerpt) Read more at global.christianpost.com ...
Yup...loosen it up a bit. Any time I take a pc to recycle I take a sledge hammer to the hard drive first. I guarantee no one will be recovering data from those drives. Doesn't take a lot to make it unrecoverable.
His ISP will have info on the sites he's visited, which may lead to his postings. Any raving writings that he made personally--like a diary--may not be online, though.
Unless the platters are physically shattered in a few thousand pieces, it is possible to reconstruct at least some data from them.
Also consider if they’re SSDs. SSDs can easily be destroyed with a magnet or a hammer. Destroy flash chips and the data is unrecoverable. Unless a platter is physically shattered, data can still be recovered. It’s all about the magnet integrity of the disk. I’ve seen data pulled from HDDs that were physically crushed but the platters were still intact.
No. I usually just use a hammer. Scoring the platters would be a reasonable (but probably unnecessary) step to prevent data recovery.
I’ll bet there is a whole lot out on the web w this psycho waiting to be found.
how convenient
I find it very challenging to believe that as this young, highly-troubled lunatic was preparing for his attack, he actually took the time to think: "I don't want investigators to have lots of evidence from which to dissect my motives, so I'm going to destroy my hard drive."
Are they going to next tell us that he wiped the place down for fingerprints, and infiltrated his wireless company's phone records? What did his Outlook, Cosi, or Google calendar say?
So the drive is no longer functionable, the data is still on the platters.
It may be there wasn’t much masculine in him to start with, if you catch my drift. And if that was the case, you can expect that info never to see the light of day.
“Riiiight, and no one has EVER been able to get data off a damaged hard drive.”
Also, a subpoena duces tecum served on an ISP is utterly and totally unheard of and never, ever done.
bttt
If it was a laptop it is real easy to remove the HD. A couple turns of small screwdriver. However the hammer or screwdriver comment is weird. If you can’t tell the difference between the flat round dent of a hammer and the sharp jab of a screwdriver you shouldn’t be a detective.
True... don't people like that actually want their ravings to be found, though?
This is a new twist in these sort of things, seems to me - that the perp goes to the effort of destroying their computer's hard drive.
Even in that condition companies that specialize in data recovery can get things off of it.
***He smashed it with a hammer to get access to the platters, and scarred the platters with a screwdriver. ***
I pulled my hard drive from an old computer and tried to destroy it. I sat it on a cement car port, took a 6 foot long 1 inch thick steel bar with a chisel tip, and smashed, smashed, smashed! I could not break the hard drive! I bent it a little, but could not break it. Finally I threw it in a burn pile and “heat treated” it.
OK. It would be easy enough to destroy a hard drive with a hammer and screwdriver. If the discs are broken, it is very doubtful that anything important would be recovered. Since they reference Yahoo, I assume that his ISP used them or he had used Yahoo as the primary search engine. It is not credible to say that his browsing habbits are no longer available, they certainly are. All ISP's are required to record that data and much more.
"authorities" are not the best place to attempt to recover data. Good data recovery companies are better at it than the GOV, with the exception of the NSA.
I don't understand why, after damaging the hard drive, that he didn't toss it in a trash can somewhere. Or put it on the stove and melt it.
um.. next time you might want to try a screw driver
or a moose bite....
Moose bites can be very nasti
The info never dies......
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