Data recovery

Cardiff city centre was busy and full of rugby fans today, so we walked to Leckwith to catch a bus to take us to Penarth. A covering of grey clouds, a slight chill wind and comparative absence of people taking their leisure gave the promenade a wintry feel. We had lunch in the pier restaurant, including an excellent 'home made' broccoli and stilton soup. Then we walked along the cliff top for an hour before heading back up into the town to catch a bus home.

With my Sunday sermon already prepared and printed out, I had time to work on retrieving and then removing data from the dead Dell XPS. A hefty machine with 'old school' modular construction, its key components, memory, CPU, network cards, hard drive are all accessible through different panels underside. I was able to find and remove the hard drive very easily. A decade ago I bought an adaptor interface that enabled a CD/DVD/HDD to connect to a PC via USB. It's come in useful for a variety of reasons over the years, but I'd  only ever had occasion to use the IDE not the SATA adaptor. The drive from the Dell is the first SATA one I've come across, so fitting it correctly was something I had to work out carefully. 

To my great pleasure it worked without incident. The drive, an early type 500GB has a couple of FAT format partitions for Windows and a couple of EXT2 partitions for Linux. Thankfully, I have an old dual boot Windows/Linux desktop machine, same age as the Dell, which is now only used for a handful of legacy programs I need occasionally to use. I fired it up into Linux Mint, which saw the attached drive immediately, and was able to transfer, albeit slowly, all files from the various partitions of the Dell drive to the safety of a new USB3 drive acquired earlier in the year. If it was possible to get an economical repair done on the Dell, I could send it off, knowing it was free of data that should be kept away from prying eyes.

I was disappointed there was no episode of 'Beck' on BBC Four tonight, as I'd expected a longer series run. Instead, another Swedish crime drama series 'Arne Dahl' shown in double episodes, with a diverse expert team assembled to apply themselves to very difficult cases, all interwoven with lots of personal relationship stories and back history stuff. I found it a bit long winded, and I began to get impatient ninety minutes into the two hour show. I preferred the concentration of 'Beck' episodes and the issues exposed. As with many high tech crime dramas these days, much is made of the ability to track cellphone users and pinpoint their locations. Is the technology portrayed in use that quick and slick to deliver results, or is it dramatic license, I wonder.