Chapter 6 HD Basics

Can you remember how the tune Pop-Goes-The-Weasel goes? Some people are better at remembering melodies than others. How are you? Are you good at this? Can you remember it now? Round and round the mulberry bush, the monkey chased the weasel Left untreated, this melody will bounce around your head all day. You will be standing in the convenience store later today waiting to buy a pop and a paper, you will be fishing through your purse or pocket when this tune will creep back into the auto-play cue. There you will stand, thinking about the damn monkey and the damn weasel. Damn them. I once had a friend who said he had a remedy for this phenomenon. It was his assertion, that if you got a song stuck in your head, you could use a simple tool to reset your player. He suggested that if you tried to think of the theme to The Love Boat (give it a second) that this melody would wipe out any other melody that might be stuck on the player. Of course, in my case he was wrong. Instead of listening to a continuous loop of The Monkey Chased the Weeeeezzzle I was stuck with a never ending loop of the Love Boat theme. I am pretty sure that Congress outlawed this with water-boarding. The Tune stuck in your head subroutine can be a powerful piece of code. Once it has launched, it can run in the background for days. Advertisers know this. Case in point: K. R. A.F. T. Can you

remember the tune? Hoards of American school children have it permanently imprinted. It is attached to a .jpg of a white-bread and cheese-substitute sandwich. This analogy compels us to look at how the hard drive works. And through an understanding of the way data is written, stored and retrieved, we can better imagine the data flow and minimize down time. A few years ago, I threw a tantrum <VIRUS>. I dont even remember what it was about, but I do remember storming across the room and catching the power cord on my notebook which was sitting on a coffee table. I didnt just pull the cord loose and leave the computer sitting there. The cord remained attached, and the notebook became a lure at the end of a deep sea fishing pole. I cast the entire computer across the room, shattering the case, cracking the LCD and popping several keys off the keyboard. Todays Mac user will appreciate the solution their preferred supplier has designed.

At the time I was a low level teacher at a low level University. All my lectures were on that computer and precariously close to being lost.

I tore the entire system down to the bones and even popped the case on the HD, transferring the platter to another old drive to recover the data. I knew just enough to know that you should never pop the case on a hard drive. NEVER. You should, instead pay someone thousands of

dollars to do this in a clean room with electrostatic protection. Should. Should. Should.

So, I carefully popped the case off the hard drive and peered inside. And there it was. Low and behold, it was a RECORD PLAYER!

Seriously! I looked down at the tiny assembly on my work-bench and it sure did look a lot like an LP playing on a turn-table. This is in fact, the mechanics of the HD. The platter is metal not vinyl, but the principal is pretty much the same. The tone-arm reads across the radius of the disk.

On that fateful day I Frankensteind just enough life out of that HD to recover the critical data to a new drive. I was lucky. Most importantly, I got a look at the insides, and what was once a mystery got de-classified. It was a tiny little version of the record player I had as a kid. And the same tune was still playing. Round and Round the Mulberry Bush, the Monkey Chased the Weeeeezle.

Once data is written to a hard drive, unless the drive undergoes some serious low-level formatting (electro-shock therapy) the data remains on the drive. If you have the right tools, you can retrieve it. If you are the CIA, you probably have these tools. I know, I watched 24.

This is an important fundamental concept in understanding how the FTU works. The data stays on the drive.

Lets take a look at the Program Change Request we submitted earlier:

LINE 1: When <VOICE> = <COMPLAIN-BRAIN>, <go system idle> LINE 2: <Move to bottom stack> LINE 3: <Allow all new data to overwrite> Notice line 2 above. Move to bottom stack. If you have ever used a Data on

graphics program you have encountered the idea of layers.

the hard drive works in a similar manner. You are selecting certain data, and sending it to the bottom. Notice line 3 above. Allow all new data to overwrite. Overwriting the sector of the HD with new data creates preeminence in the data architecture. The new data is on top. The more we access the new data, the deeper the old data is buried in the stack. Using the Monkey and the Weasel as our test bed, lets write a snippit of code to test our theory. My favorite piece of open-source audio software is called Audacity. In audacity, you can select a portion of a wave file, and replace it with silence. It provides a very visual medium to illustrate the process. Lets run an internal test on the file now, replacing the code. Step One Start the malicious audio file <RETURN> Step Two Move to bottom stack <RETURN> Step Three Replace with silence. <RETURN>

Every Friday, the landscape maintenance crew comes around and maintains the landscape where I work. They bring with them an assortment of WMDs like mowers, blowers, edgers and ICBMs, all of which are operated by noisy-smoky-stinky 2-stroke motors that sound like Monkeys spanking bumblebees. And every Friday, like clockwork when the racket starts, I can feel my system temperature start to climb. This is the real-world application for the new code. Yes, of course I get up and close the windows, and put my ear plugs in. But by running a little bit of code, I avoid the spam and malware. Just inserting a little bit of silence, is sometimes all that is needed. Noise = Bumblebees Insert - Silence <System Temp Normal> You can send a formal program request using your new mEmail addy, but writing a little shorthand code on the fly is often enough to take the tone-arm off the record. You might need to run the insert-silence code a few times but its no wonder. The monkey has been chasing the weasel on your internal record player since toys took D-cells. <INSERT SILENCE> <SYSTEM IDLE> <HUMMMMMMMMMM>