How To Open A Seagate FreeAgent Hard Drive In Order To Make Some Kind Of Attempt At Destroying The Potentially Incriminating Data Contained Therein

While I've really quite enjoyed switching to the Mac, the move has definitely led to some serious wastage of time - not only in setting up and acclimating to the new system, but also in having to deal with some unforeseen, unfortunate events.

The most recent such wastage of time, which I'm apparently determined to extend by writing this blog posting, happened as a result of the process of switching (almost) all of my external hard drives from NTFS to HFS+ (the mac filesystem).

In order to do this, I had to move data from drive to drive, so that I could free each one up to be reformatted as HFS+.

Also, files that I normally encrypt with DriveCrypt (my Windows encryption utility) had to be decrypted so that I could re-encrypt them on the Mac (using Disk Utility and sparseimages).

So while I usually have at least two copies of every important file, on different hard drives, I figured it might be OK to briefly chance it with less while reformatting drives.

Oops.

After copying files to a brand new Seagate FreeAgent 500GB External Hard drive that I just purchased on Friday (8/18), I was moving some of the files from it onto another drive when it suddenly started making the click of death.

This, just after I had reformatted the drive with the original files, from NTFS to HFS+ and then back to NTFS (b/c the HFS+ format failed for some reason).

What was on the drive? About 30,000MP3s, some FLACs of my own music that had taken me months to compile, and, of more importance to this blog posting, some personal data - financial stuff, etc. No, there was not any porn on there. All that's safe.

Anyway, I've been through all this before, and so, after verifying that the Seagate could no longer be recognized by the Mac or by Windows, I immediately put it in the freezer.

Meanwhile, I set to work trying to recover data from the reformatted backup. Using GetDataBack for NTFS, a program that has saved my butt in the past, I've been able to locate about 20,000 MP3s ... the only problem is, they're all named with random characters. Like, 012a435d.mp3. Oh well. I'll live. As for the personal data, I already had copied that over to my Mac.

But back to the issue at hand. So I take the Seagate out of the freezer after a few hours and it's still clicking and still can't be recognized by either the Mac or by Windows. I run SpinRite from my old ThinkPad and try to get it to read the drive, but it's not detectable by the BIOS.

So now I have a dead Seagate FreeAgent 500GB hard drive, which incidentally had only cost me $119 at OfficeMax. It was still returnable/exchangeable, since I'd just bought it a few days prior ... but how to return it when there's potentially sensitive information on there, especially since I've heard horror stories about data left on returned hard drives?

A little research suggested that, short of pulverizing or melting the platters in the hard disk, it would be difficult to completely erase the data on a drive without actually writing it over. A degausser might do it ... but that seemed to be out of the question given the expense and waiting time obtaining one would entail. Even so, with a decent magnet and access to the actual platters, you can apparently make it fairly difficult for anyone to get the data back without using advanced techniques.

So ...

Here's the Seagate FreeAgent 500. Note the plastic stand, which isn't meant to be detached and which prevents these drives from being stackable:

It turns out that the stand and the rest of the drive casing are pretty much a closed unit. There are no visible screws, or even hidden ones, and there's no obvious way to open the casing.

Flipping the unit upside down, the bottom cover can be pried off with a screwdriver and removed:

Finally, some screws! One thing's for sure, this is not your typical external hard drive enclosure.


At last some familiar looking connections - power supply, data, glowbar power:

The wires are detached and the board is removed:

Finally the last of the screws that keep the bottom part on:

After removing the last part of the stand, the casing itself was still shut tight as a clam.

It took several screwdriver initiatives to pry the thing open, but that was the only way to go about it. It was almost certainly designed to be shut once and never opened again. The thing made a horrific cracking sound as it opened, though the plastic tabs inside were intact.


The metal drive casing is removed from the plastic cover, revealing:

Peeling back the metal foil and pulling the wire cover off:

On the side, these rubber bumpers are cute but need to come off:

They appear to have been affixed with some kind of space-age superadhesive ... but they do pry off eventually, showing these cylindrical protruding screws, which are also kind of cute:

After removing those screws, the metal casing can be pried off (there's a lot of prying going on here).

VOILA! The hard drive itself! It's a Seagate Barracuda 500GB 7200RPM drive.

Now, it's time to get to the real work!

But wait ... what's this?
AAAGH!!! Torx!!!

It's time to go to ... Radio Shack!

It's also time to get some magnets!

These particular magnets have "hundreds of uses around the home":

Which probably means they're not very strong ... however these mamas are the rare-earth kind, whatever that means ... all I know is that all the packages were stuck together and stuck to everything else around them like the pages of a favorite magazine:

I probably should have gotten a bunch, since they were only like $1.99 each, but oh well.

OK ... now, with the Torx 'driver, the screws around the edges of the drive can be removed, and finally the mysterious, forbidden, warranty-breaking screw can be lustily unfastened:

to reveal the beauty of the promised land (look, I've never seen the inside of a hard drive before):


Now it's time to make my lame attempt at getting rid of the data on there:

OK, that looks kinda silly. I admit it. This is gonna look even more silly:

Yep, that's the rare-earth magnet, under my thumb. I will say though, that I had to hold it there - letting it go meant that it would fly across the drive and rest on the center disk or the other magnets.

Not feeling satisfied with this weak appearing methodology, I set about to further dismantle this mofo:

Just look at those tasty platters ...

De-torxing the top rim allowed the removal of the platters, and their subsequent scraping via Phillips-head screwdriver.

I will say, those are some pretty hefty platters. I had no idea. They're solid metal and feel good in the hand. They're probably also excellent to use as coasters or in some art project.

And that's it. That's all I could think of doing. That should be enough, right? I mean c'mon. I didn't have anything THAT spectacular on there. But I just didn't want to feel nauseated thinking about someone getting hold of anything that might be there ...

So I put everything back together, which went well except there was one extra screw and also when I tried to snap it all back together I managed then to break one of the tabs ... GREAT. So now it won't close properly:


Oh well. I took it back to OfficeMax and exchanged it for a new drive. They were actually pretty nice about it. Probably someone at Seagate will look at the drive and go, W..T..F??

And before you take this posting as another example of my admittedly shaky moral fortitude, I would say in my defense that the drive did fail just a few days after I bought it and was completely unreadable, so it had to go back to Seagate anyway - but since my data was on there, the only way to get at it before returning it was to open the drive and access the platters. Right?

Now ... back to trying to recover 30,000 MP3s ...

Boy writing this was a good use of my time ...

More Thoughts On Switching To The Mac

Well I’ve had the MacBook Pro for a couple of weeks now and wanted to update my previous comments about switching to the Mac. This is probably gonna be a long post but I’ve been meaning to write for a while ... also the blog comment notification system wasn’t working but I think it’s working now.

First of all I want to say that there’s no question in my mind that switching was/is the right thing to do. I just can’t say enough about how much I’m enjoying using this computer. There’s just something intangible about it … at the risk of sounding corny, it just feels like this thing has been put together with care and class and it’s just absolutely beautiful to look at (the OS that is, although the laptop itself is quite easy on the eyes as well). I would say the difference between using the Mac and using Windows XP (haven’t tried Vista yet) as being the difference between flying first class and flying coach. You get to the same place eventaully, but the experience is sooo much nicer. It’s just unfortunate that first class is so much more freakin’ expensive … but if you can get a free upgrade using your miles or something, it’s nice. Not that that last part is really part of the analogy.

OK, first of all, some specific things that I've really liked.

I’ve done the right thing and switched from Entourage to Mail.app/iCal/Address Book. Entourage was a hog and just slowed everything down. It was trying to be Outlook but wasn’t cutting it. Yuck.

Mail.app took a while to import all my email from Entourage but now that it’s all in there, it’s working much snappier than Entourage ever did. There’s some delay in opening mail folders … but not as bad. (Outlook had no such delays by the way. Sigh … believe me, the Mail/iCal/Addressbook combo is still not Outlook, but at least it’s not trying to be and failing, like Entourage).

The smart mailboxes feature is very cool. Before, I had unread mail in folders scattered everywhere, which I was planning to respond to “someday” … but now with one mailbox that collects all my “Unread Mail,” I’ve been answering emails from months ago (I know … why bother, but I’m OCD that way).

Address Book and iCal work decently for what they do. I will say though that syncing with the Treo is not a straightforward experience. Currently I’m using something called “Missing Sync” which is better than the Hotsync Manager default, but even so it doesn’t sync really the way it should. It’s close enough though.

One annoying thing is that the Entourage calendar is still starting up in the background somehow … I can’t turn it off. I uncheck the Entourage database in the “Login Items” in TinkerTool so that it shouldn't start up again, but it just puts another copy of itself there. Anyway what this means is that I’m still getting my calendar notifications from there, on top of the ones I’m getting from iCal. Looks like I’ll probably just have to completely uninstall Entourage to get this to stop happening …

Other things I’m liking are Adium for IM (except for AIM file transfers, which do not seem to work on there), DragThing, Journler (free journaling software), SuperDuper for backups (why don’t they have this for Windows?? Nero BackItUp was crapadelic), and little things like how advanced screen capture is built in to the OS (maybe vista has this now though).

And on top of all that, Parallels is still utterly amazing … I wasn’t able to find a suitable substitute for MS Money (Quicken on the Mac sucks, as do all the other programs IMHO … plus I just have too much data in MS Money to properly export) … so I just run it in Windows – works like it always does. Nice. And it runs in a window on my Mac OS screen, too.

An offshoot of that is that originally I had planned to have Mac OS on half of my hard drive, and Windows on the other half – so 100GB for each. However, after using the Mac for a week, it became clear that there was not going to be as much of a need for Windows as I’d originally thought … so I redid the Boot Camp partitioning so that Windows is only using 25GB now. Of course that meant reinstalling Windows AGGGGGGGGAAAAIINNNN … for the 25432nd time in the past 4 years … AAAGGGHHH!!!!

OK. Now onto some things that have taken some getting used to.

I find the antialiasing to not be as crisp as with Windows Cleartype. It looks a little fuzzy to me, even with it on “light” … I mean it’s not bad, but when I look at Windows XP, the text just looks crisper.

Trying to find a good software MP3 player. I have to admit that I do not understand iTunes. I’ll have to spend some time playing with it. I was using Foobar2000 on Windows and it just opened up real snappily when I wanted to hear an mp3 … now it just seems like when I double click on an MP3 file that I want to listen to, I gotta wait for iTunes to load up and it takes a while. I know you can preview an MP3 from the finder but … well it’s not the same.

Is there a good MP3 tagging program? One that can do batch tagging, batch renaming, and filename to tag conversion etc. I found a program called MediaRage but it’s not really as user friendly as what I was using on Windows (MP3TagEdit).

Also the program MP3Gain for Windows does not, in my opinion, have an acceptable substitute on the Mac. There is something called MacMP3Gain which purports to do the same thing, but it can’t roll back the changes if necessary, and you can’t just drop a file or two into it. It has to be run on an entire folder.

Actually the Mac counterparts to several Windows programs don’t seem to run as well. Even MS Word … it’s not the same. There’s a little delay when you type. Like, the letters don’t appear on the screen at the same moment you type. It’s subtle but annoying. To me that is. Like I said, I’m OCD that way. One of my documents has a large table in it, and typing absolutely crawls when I’m in there. Why?

Also. I don’t know if any of you have used a program called MindManager for Windows, but the Mac version just blows. It opens the windows files, which is cool, but it does not work in an acceptable manner. I was going to use it to organize my thoughts for this posting but I wound up using OmniOutliner instead.

I even kind of miss Windows Media Player. Quicktime sucks. There’s VLC media player which for some reason doesn’t feel as snappy as on Windows. There’s also a program called Miro that I have to try out a little more but it seemed slow.

Also still trying to find an acceptable image viewing/cataloguing program. How do you spell catalogueing? dammit.

Right now it’s coming down to Adobe Lightroom vs. iView Media Pro (now called Microsoft Expression Media). I feel like I should like Lightroom more, but actually I think I prefer the iView. Aperture isn’t going to cut it I don’t think.

And a few other little things. Why can’t the icons on the Finder desktop be placed closer together? They are just too far apart and it takes up too much room. I tried something called Path Finder to replace the Finder, and the desktop icons are closer together and there are some other snazzy features, but though the concept is nice, it just didn’t work that well … it messes up the Exposé “show desktop” thing and also is slower to open directory listing windows than the Finder.

I’m changing all my external hard drives to HFS+ … the Mac can’t write to NTFS and I didn’t see the point in converting everything to FAT32 … that seemed like it would be going back in time … the only thing has been trying to move data around to empty out the drives one at a time to do the conversions … but in the end I will have 3x300GB HFS+ drives, 1 500GB HFS+ drive, and 1 300GB NTFS drive (for old times sake and because I’m still going to use the Dell for sequencing). I’ve been using MacDrive (demo version) on Windows to access the HFS+ drives, which seems to work nicely for the most part (but not always).

Finally I miss being able to do CTRL-ALT-DEL to bring up a list of the active processes and the memory/CPU each one is consuming, to force quit a process from there. I know you can do Cmd-Option-Esc on the Mac to bring up a list of active programs, but you can’t (from there) see if Firefox is doing the usual 50% CPU/400MB RAM thing. I suppose for most program crashes you’d tend to know which one it is, but sometimes the computer’s just running slowly and making that high-fan noise and then you have to go to Activity Monitor to see what’s going on. Why not just make that accessible with the Cmd-Option-Esc?

I also miss having a real Delete key to erase characters to the right of the cursor. The “Fn” and “Delete (I mean Backspace)” keys are on opposite sides of the keyboard (on the MBP that is) and it takes two hands to do the Del function. I mean, c’mon. I know you can map the “Enter” key on the right of the spacebar to something else, but why even have that key there? Anyway I’ve mapped it to CTRL.

But anyway all in all, nothing's perfect. The overall experience is still quite exquisite. I love this computer … I mean look, I just spent an hour and a half writing this post about it. That has to say something, right?

Now all I have to do is stop spending so much time installing programs and start actually doing work with it!!!

Thoughts, anyone?

Treo 755p - yeah boooyyyyiiieeeeee!!!!

The second toy I wanted to tell y’all about is my new Treo 755p for Sprint – the old Treo 650 was spontaneously rebooting every half an hour or so, despite everything I tried, so I brought it in to the Sprint store & it turns out that since I’ve got the Service & Repair plan ($4/month), they just gave me a new phone, for no extra charge. Sweeeeeeet!!!!

The 755p is definitely lighter and smaller than the 650; there’s no antenna anymore. And no more spontaneous reboots!!! Plus it can access Sprint’s EVDO network, so internet speed is actually tolerable now. Best of all it can fit in my back pocket!

However there are some little annoyances. For example, some reason every time it rings or otherwise makes a sound (text message sound, etc), there is a little “BEEP” that occurs at the start of the sound. In fact it is the sound of the “STAR” key being pressed, and apparently this is a glitch that many people are experiencing. There’s no fix for it.

The button layout is different. I prefer the layout of the 650. They put the menu button way on the bottom right now and it’s the same size as any other button. I liked it when it was one of the huge buttons up top.

Also headset volume is still too low ... I’ve tried some third party software that purports to raise the volume (such as VolumeCare) but haven’t found them to be useful.

The problem where it waits ten seconds to dial a number after you’ve hit “Dial” seems better though. It’s just a few seconds now.

All in all I can’t complain. It’s definitely an improvement over the Treo 650. I highly recommend the repair/warranty plan if your carrier has it – saved me a lot of money.

I'm not sure what this all has to do with the BlackBerry but hopefully someone can help me with that. :-P

MacBook Pro

Hey Diode!

So I have three new toys that I wanted to share with ya … here is the first:

MacBook Pro: I got a 15” MBP off of eBay and so far it’s been really quite nice … for the most part I’m very pleased with it. I’d initially planned to continue to use Windows programs with Parallels, but after working with the Mac for a few days I’ve decided to convert everything over to Mac. Some observations:

1) Windows runs like a champ on Boot Camp and in Parallels. However, being able to compare it side-by-side with the Mac OS … well, there’s no comparison. Windows just feels kludgy and ugly. Now of course I’m running Windows XP and not Vista … but I suspect there’s still a major difference in “feel” between the Mac and anything else.

2) It hasn’t helped that I’ve already had to REinstall Windows, since the first installation (which I spent hours on) developed some sort of major error and stopped working. Re-installing windows … jeez I hope I never have to do that again … (but I suspect I will … )

3) Using the Mac reminds me of how much I’ve missed using one all these years. That was a brilliant marketing move by Apple, getting the universities to use Macs all those years ago … I used one freshman year in college because that’s all they had in the computer lab, and purchased my Mac 512ke because Apple had a sweet student discount … that was almost 20 years ago. And it created a lifelong Mac fan …

4) The thing I miss the most about my Dell & my Thinkpad: The TRACKPOINT. Can’t anybody else see how much better a trackpoint is? You don’t have to move your hands from typing position. Sigh …

5) The Apple trackpad, thankfully, is better than the trackpad on any of the laptops I’ve had before … the scrolling function is nice, and it's nice to be able to do right clicks with 2 fingers, … but it’s still a trackpad …

6) Windows programs I miss: ACDSee (Fastest image viewer EVER … there must be something like it for the Mac but I haven’t found it …), Outlook (am using Entourage now, but … see below), FinePrint, Microsoft Money (going to see if I can get Quicken for Mac to work), Cakewalk Sonar, foobar2000, DriveCrypt

7) Still trying to figure out how to best manage my email, contacts, etc. … I don’t think the Mac solutions are going to cut it … the closest there is to Outlook 2003 is, of course, Entourage 2004, but it is severely lacking in many of the things Outlook has … SEVERELY … but it’s going to have to do for now … took forever to transfer 30,000+ emails …

8) Firefox and Thunderbird settings transferred quite nicely (just pointed them to the folders that I copied over from my PC)

9) Lots of little goodies are similar if not better on the Mac … such as chat client (Adium), bittorent client (Transmission), media player …

Of course there’s just that “intangible” thing that Windows just lacks … the Mac is just beautiful and elegant, from the OS to the hardware and even to the packaging etc. … too bad it comes at such a premium …

Recert Examination

So I was looking into registering for the 2007 recertification exam for IM ... and found this:

"Effective in 2006, the certification exam in Internal Medicine will decrease in length from 2 days to 1 day."

WOOHOOO!!!!!!

That is so awesome. That really sucked, having to stay overnight in freakin' WHITE PLAINS back in '97.

Does this mean that it is now only 8 hours long, instead of 16 hours? That would be sweet.

I noticed also that the test is being given only on the following dates ... August
14, 17, 20, 22, 24, 27, 29, or 30, or September 5 or 7, 2007 *

I thought it was given twice a year? So that if I failed it in the Spring I could retake it in the fall? Or am I thinking of the USMLE?

I was actually thinking about taking the test cold (kind of like what Dr. Sarkisian did) (except that I haven't really practiced for almost 2 years now) ... but I suppose that would be wasting $1000+ if I did fail.

Someone please explain something to me though, on the ABIM site in my profile, it says that I'm "Eligible, Not Registered" for the exam itself. Does this mean that I already paid the $1150 fee for the exam? I'm not sure. Help me out?

Goose

Happticular!!!!

On behalf of "DIODE" I'd like to wish our own Mem P. Com, M.D. a most HAPPY BIRTHDAY on this the final day of June 2006!!!!!

And I'd like to ask the following questions of said birthday greetings recipient:

1. What was the most meaningful moment of the past 365 days?

2. How are you different now than you were on June 30, 2005?

3. What do you most hope will happen in your life between now and June 30, 2007?

4. I am thinking of a number between 1 and 20. What is that number?

Has It Really Been 10 Years?

[Click for full size!]

Heartbreaking

Doctor Kills Self After Malpractice Verdict

Here's the doctor's website:
http://www.vasdoctor.com/

Florida's malpractice situation is out of control:
Jury awards $28 million in gynecologist case

Did you see Stephen Colbert annihilate GWB?

If you haven't seen the video, you have GOT to. Stephen Colbert spoke at the White House Correspondents' Dinner over the weekend and destroyed GWB, just a few feet away from the man. You can practically hear the audience going "WTF is this?!"

Best quality "stream" I've seen is here (2 parts) ... but this one here seems to have a little more at the beginning (someone else introducing him, haven't seen this one) and might load a little faster since its quality is lower.

You can download the entire video (which includes the entire Correspondents' Dinner; Colbert's piece starts at around 54 min, from what I've heard) via this torrent.

Lastly there's a transcript of the thing here. Watch the video first though. Trust me.

He used a couple of bits that he's done before on the Colbert Report, but the majority of it is new & all of it is scathing ... especially given that Bush is RIGHT THERE!!!!

Must be seen!!!!!

iAudio X5

So I finally got a new MP3 player. It's the Cowon iAudio X5 ... check this out:

http://www.ouijacat.com/g2/v/2006/20060417_misc/Together.jpg.html

The "next" photo after that has some more comparisons. So far I like it a lot - plus it also records to mp3 via mic or line-in ... and the sound quality is excellent.

The navigation system is good but not great ... however it looks like Rockbox is working on replacement firmware (it was only the Rockbox firmware that made the Archos usable!!)

Anyhow, I highly recommend the X5 if you're into quality, features & value, and not just what everyone else is getting. (zing!)

Plus, as you can see from the picture at right, it comes with a hot chick inside it.