In 2022 I was working in Denmark as underpaid renovation worker. In trash I have found HDD.

Manufactured in August 2000. Old boy with 30GB of capacity.
I'am a curious man so I bought a chinnese cheap "2 Way IDE To SATA or SATA To IDE Bi-Directional Converter Adapter For Hard Drive HDD CD DVD" needed to connect this IDE disk to my motherboard.

And guess what. It worked. Both things. I was disappointed when I saw only Windows98 installation files and I put the disc away.
But now, knowing a little bit more about data recovery I will give it another try.

Using dd and scp commands I have made disk image and moved it to Kali Linux machine in my virtualized home lab.

Quick glance using Autopsy






I see tracks I have left last time. Almost all files were last time accessed in 2007, expect few which I have tried to run in 2022. I have missed two files.
03-KEY.TXT
README.TXT
Thanks to these files, now I know that this is not some boring and ordinary Win98


but pirated repack made in May 17, 1998 by Pirates With Attitudes(PWA), one of the first groups ever to be prosecuted. It's easy to find members' names. One of them, according to LinkedIn profile is Azure specialist. Funny.


What about files that used to be on this drive before?
Just normal things from family owned PC. The Sims 2, NFS:Hot Pursuit 2, Winrar, Skype, trees of "New Folders", random photos and furry porn drawings hidden in directory called Movies.
Nothing that should be made public here.