UC San Diego

The purpose of this study is to determine whether or not the data written on a modern high-density hard disk drive can be recovered via magnetic force microscopy of the disks' surface. To this end, a variety of image processing techniques are utilized to process the raw images into a readily usable form, and subsequently, a simulated read channel is designed to produce an estimate of the raw data corresponding to the magnetization pattern written on the disk. Using a specially prepared hard disk drive, the performance of this process is analyzed and techniques to improve it are investigated. Finally, some interesting results about maximal length shift register sequences are presented