Recovery of Information from Erased Magnetic Medium

Project Summary

Produce a magnetic imaging device for the purpose of recovering data from damaged, erased, and/or overwritten magnetic media. The IDEMM strategy is based on a two-pronged approach: (A) LANL uses standard MFM imaging experiments to develop the techniques necessary to reconstruct a bit stream from the MFM data signal; (B) LANL develops methods (and an instrument) to obtain data from a single track on a hard disk that can be turned into a bit stream.

Findings have been very encouraging. The researchers have been able to scan potentially damaged disks down to very small areas – e.g., 100 square microns. Recently this research group sent us an image that copies a portion of a 20 Gigabyte hard drive containing an erased version of the Preamble to the USA Constitution used as testing material for reconstruction. The region in the image is a 10X10 micron scan - about 1/3 the cross-section of a human hair - with a scan resolution of better than 30 nanometers (30 billionths of a meter) that can "distinguish" hundreds of sub-areas across the scan. This resolution is more than adequate to detect the individual magnetic information "bits" that range from 50 to 150 nanometers in size. These bits would be indistinguishable by other techniques.

• Project Lead: Fred Mueller (Los Alamos)