Re: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion
What kind of hack do you use to read the platters in analog mode? Firmware mod or you do attach some gadget directly to the head controller and dump the analog data of all the surface for post processing? Asking for a friend 
For SMD, Shugart 1000, MFM and ESDI drives the raw signal is right there on the connectors, the controller does the a/d and sampling. This is why some controller cards are much better at reading disks than others. Degraded servo tracks on non-stepper motor drives are usually the problem here.
For IDE and up you do have to do a bit of surface mounted troubleshooting to find the head output from the Op-Amps but it's do-able. Now the professionals will open the disk in a clean room then remove the platters and read them with custom heads. Also remember you don't have to get the whole disk you just need to find the file of the wallet.dat. Even part of it would go a long way, and with things like a 256 bit ECC code you can probably compute out the missing bits with a lot of CPU power.
I like screwing with this stuff, keeps me out of trouble. The ironkey would be a lot harder IMO:
Nice. Still the problem with more current drives is the extreme density in comparison to previous ones and thus the low tolerances during the process. In practise you would probably need to scan all the whole platters anyways as you don't really know where the file is and might have been written over several ones to increase read/write speed (or so I assume).
The reason I think the Ironkey guy has a better chance is mostly because a) He already has the device b) It is not damaged and c) the guy (presumably) already has enough money to fund the costly effort.
As for the technique, I was thinking about maybe using a SEM. Something like this:
https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~sps32/cardis2016_sem.pdf
Of course some lab reverse engineering (on other units) would be needed even if just to check the viability on this particular device... But for 7000BTC I would say it is worth the try.