Excellent talks on hard drive data recovery by computer forensics and data recovery specialist Scott Moulton, for those that feel confident messing with their hardware. Extremely informative and very useful especially in those cases where you’d like to salvage your data from a broken drive, but don’t want to shell out ~€2,000 for a professional data recovery company to do it.

Two lectures, one from DEFCON 14 (2006) and another from 15 (2007). There’s some overlap, but they’re both interesting to watch nevertheless. Around 45 minutes each.

Hard Drive Recovery (at DEFCON 14): Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Advanced Hard Drive Data Recovery (at DEFCON 15): Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Image by Flickr/Roberto F. Used under Creative Commons BA-NC-ND licence