Researching The Hack: Found Disk Analysis

When you hack you begin to find disks every-where. Some have been discarded, mangled, warped, bent; some have been carelessly lost, in the drive of a public computer, under a keyboard, be-hind a desk; and others you will find in their natural place - lying around on people's desks, in disk boxes, in library reference books, in file cabinets. You will want to be able to read data files off these disks and rerun any programs on them.

I am not going to suggest that you actively steal disks that you find in an office or wherever, but if you can manage to sneak one away for a few days or overnight without it being missed, then the best of luck to you!

Before I go into what should be done with found disks, let's get our terminology straight. Here I will be talking about microcomputer disks, which come in two varieties: 5 1/4" and 3 1/2" disks. A disk is composed of two parts. There is the square plastic outside, which I will refer to as the envelope, and the circular mylar disk inside. The square envelope is simply a means of protecting the flimsy and fragile disk within, and can be horribly mutilated without damaging data on the disk itself. 31h" disks have a small plastic or metal door that slides open to reveal the disk inside. 51/4" disks are unprotected in this way; their disks are exposed
through an oval hole.

WARNING!
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Never put a disk of unknown origin, especially a physically damaged one, into a good disk drive. Before examining found or damaged disks, you should get ahold of a cheap, second-hand drive and use that for found disk analysis. Examining bad disks can easily damage your disk drive. Never use bad, damaged or
found disks on a good quality drive!