Through a personal 6 degrees of separation thing I ended up hearing about a gentleman, Kevin Ripa, who was coming into town and who had an extensive background in computer forensics. After some introductions and a few e-mails I arranged for him to come in and give a presentation to my first and second years. The presentation was extremely well received and everyone raved about just how much they learned in that brief period of time. He provided some excellent insights as to how many IT people need to get that chip off their shoulder and be honest about what they don't know, or as he put it, "You need to know what you don't know!" He said he couldn't begin to count the number of times he has had to deal with situations where the IT staff, either in their pride, ignorance or both, made his job very difficult or damn near impossible. It was a great lesson for the students. One of the interesting points I took away from the presentation was how hard drives store Adaptives about their individual pattern for reading the platters and tracks as well the negative cylinders or sectors used by the drive to store this information and information from the HD ROM. He also mentioned that the software the hard drives use varies substantially from manufacturer to manufacturer and that some of the bigger companies will have a person who specializes on data recovery for each manufacturer. Considering how often these drives change, I have a feeling this field could have a disastrous affect on one's personal quality of life!
As a result of this talk, and the fact that we discovered the new machines in the computer labs no longer have serial ports, I changed the lab from studying about serial port communication to analyzing the Master Boot Record, Boot Sector and MFT in NTFS. Although I think there are still some essential skills and transferable knowledge to be gained from playing with serial communication, I may finally have to put this technology to bed on a practical side.
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