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WASHINGTON - Older White House computer hard drives have been destroyed, the White House disclosed to a federal court Friday in a controversy over millions of possibly missing e-mails from 2003 to 2005. The White House revealed new information about how it handles its computers in an effort to persuade a federal magistrate it would be fruitless to undertake an e-mail recovery plan that the court proposed. "When workstations are at the end of their lifecycle and retired ... the hard drives are generally sent offsite to another government entity for physical destruction," the White House said in a sworn...

Toshiba says it has become the first manufacturer to commercially release hard drives with perpendicular recording platters, an industrywide innovation that greatly increases the amount of data a drive can hold. The MK4007GAL 1.8-inch drive packs 40GB on a single platter, which is the most for a 1.8-inch diameter hard drive platter to date. The platters can hold 206 megabits per square millimeter. The drive can be found in Toshiba's Gigabeat F41 music player. Toshiba also makes drives for Apple Computer's iPods. Two configurations of the drive exist: a 40GB with one platter and a two-platter 80GB drive. Next year,...

Wondering if any freeper can help. I've tried Fry's, HP, and Radio Shack: no joy. I gave a friend's daughter an HP laptop last year as a college-entrance present. It lasted 6 months and someone gave it a big cup of coke. We managed to save the HD. Now I am trying to put the drive in a standard desktop PC. I bought a kit which provides spacers and a special header to bring power in thru the HD pinouts. Then the big surprise. THE PINS ON THE LAPTOP PC DRIVE (and the adapter) DO NOT MATCH a STANDARD IDE...

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday October 07, @05:45PM from the need-to-know-basis dept. jaromil writes "Today at about 18:00 CET FBI raided the indymedia servers hosted by Rackspace both in US and England. At present, the italian indymedia and numerous other local IMC websites are obscured, while the reasons why the hard drives were taken are still unknown."

developing story

CBSNEWS: Haunted By Ghosts Of Hard Drives PastSimson Garfinkel, a graduate student at the MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science, holds a used hard drive he bought containing personal information. (AP)Haunted By Ghosts Of Hard Drives Past CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Jan. 16, 2003 "People will think they have deleted the file, they can't find the file themselves and that the file is gone when, in fact, forensically you may be able to retrieve it." Tom Aleman Deloitte & Touche (AP) So, you think you cleaned all your personal files from that old computer you got rid of? Two MIT graduate students suggest...

<p>Michael Norman, who in his "semi-retired" spare time enjoys turning discarded computers into functioning tools, often donating them to poor schoolchildren, has happened across the carcass of one eye-opening machine in a Dumpster next to a Dunkin' Donuts in Schaumburg, Ill.</p>