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Tigrael440 karma

Geologist here. I have some old hard drive platters and access to a scanning electron microscope. Anyone want me to try this and post pictures?

EDIT: Obligatory RIP inbox. Okay, if I can find the platters by Sunday I'll do it this weekend; else it might be a few days because our big yearly conference is coming up (AGU for those in the know) so SEM time is becoming a precious resource.

EDIT 2 SATURDAY NIGHT (LIVE) EDITION: I've got some time scheduled for Wednesday night!

EDIT 3: Thank you kind Swedish-speaking stranger for the gold.

EDIT 4 FEELING GOOD ON A WEDNESDAY: Got the pictures, will post them by Saturday when I'm done being busy with Thanksgiving things. I wasn't able to focus well enough to see what we wanted; I'm going to see if I can get one of the people in the department good at taking wicked high magnification pics to help out. I took some images of other things though that I think are cool, so there'll at least be SOME pretty pictures this week. Stay tuned!

Tigrael41 karma

Yeah! This SEM is brand new (we got it this past January) and definitely has a digital camera. I have no idea what I'm doing in terms of data recovery since I usually just look at rocks, but I'll try out the various instruments (backscatter, secondary electron, cathodoluminescene, color cathodoluminescence, and EDAX just for fun). Worst case scenario we'll just have a really cool image of the surface of a disk drive platter.