I've got an HP G50-133US laptop with a Seagate Momentus 5400.4 250GB hard
drive that I need to perform an acquisition upon. Normally, I would simply
pull the hard drive and attach it to my collection station; this is a data
recovery/analysis case, not a forensic investigation, so there is no need
for write-blocking. The problem is that the drive only functions correctly
in the laptop - that I've verified. Here are the symptoms:
- In the laptop, it boots to Vista Home Premium without a hitch
- The laptop BIOS doesn't appear to have any configuration settings, or
even display the existence of a drive
- There is no BIOS password set for admin or user
- When the HD is hooked to the collection machine, the boot process
sometimes recognizes the presence of the drive, sometimes not.
- When it does recognize the drive's presence, it identifies the drive
correctly as ST9250827AS. But it takes a long time. FYI, this model
doesn't feature full drive encryption.
- The mere presence of the drive prevents booting into an O/S, even though
it is way down on SATA Channel 4, and fourth on the list of drives in the
boot order. I've manually intercepted the boot sequence to try force it to
boot from the proper drive or a CD, but get a system error of O/S not found.
It also takes a long time to get to this point.
- Attaching the drive after the system is booted doesn't help. In Linux,
the drive is simply not noticed. In XP, attaching the drive after booting
causes Explorer and MMC to hang.
So I've come to the tentative conclusion that there is a symbiotic
relationship between the drive and its laptop. I remember reading once
about mating drives to systems, possibly in this forum but haven't recovered
the thread. Insights are welcome!
lol
