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Digital Forensics

The project involves writing a document/tutorial and also software. There are several sources on the internet that help in understanding the file system internals and how the hard drives are organized after it is formatted. But I did not find one document that would answer all the questions in a coherent manner. For example, information about the meta-data and how to get it is there. But it is scattered across several sources. So writing this document will be a learning experience for those who do not already know about it. This will lead to the next step of writing software.

  • Given a damaged hard drive or a corrupted hard drive how do you find what kind of partition was on the drive. The boot sector is damaged or corrupted; many blocks holding metadata are damaged or corrupted.
  • Recover the partition and also provide a statistics on what percentage was recovered. This includes recovering files of different types – .jpg, .pdf, mpg, tiff etc.

    • Expectations:

  • Ability write programs in c/c++.
  • Willingness to learn new languages for Human-Computer-Interface

    • What do you learn?

  • Improve your programming skills to do an industry standard project.
  • Make decisions on when, what data structures to use.
  • Learn to actually implement the data structures in real life example.
  • Internals of the Operating system file structures and how to manipulate them.

    • Contact:

    Neeraj K Gupta; Office: ECSS 3.207; Email: contact

    File structure

    Department of Computer Science