Question : Problem: Killer traced by disc

Just wondering if anyone knows a good site that will explain how Kansas City Police were able to track the disk that the BTK killer sent to the media, back to the church.  I know that when you write to digital media that it is imprinted with specific data re: time date netbios names, etc...  This process is what I am looking for information on.  Thanks for any help!

Answer : Problem: Killer traced by disc

I read the BTK killing report from CNN and it seems that what the investigators did was to recover preserved data from the floppy disc.

As you would know, when you format a disc at first use, the computer readies the disc's file system for reading/writing. When you write data to the disc, it stays there. In an event you delete the data in the disc, logically, the data is not there, but physically, it is still there. What happens is, the file system marks the sector where the data is previously saved as "available" but still, the old data is still there. The old data can only be erased permanently if a new data takes over the address of the old data (the address refers to the location where the data is saved), hence, overwritten.

In my theory, what happened is, the killer might have deleted or emptied the disc, but when he saved something on the disc, some part of the disc were never overwritten, preserving the old data that was there before he emptied the disk.

There are many disc revovery software that can do this and an example is Ontrack's Easy Recovery. www.ontrack.com, and two of it's best features are recovery damaged disk and recover formatted disks. And this might be what the police used.

Lapukman