I had some fun on Friday morning. It was my first attempt at creating a forensic disk image of the 2 GB Jaz disks (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaz_drive). We have had these disks in the University Archives for several years, but haven’t had the capability to deal with them. Our student is currently working through our backlog of previous accessions of digital records and he came upon these Jaz disks. He had never seen or even heard of a Jaz disk. I tried to explain that they were from the manufacturer of Zip disks. This only proved to show my age, since he had never heard of these either; before his time.

The great difficulty with Jaz drives is that they were never all that popular in the consumer market and used a more expensive connection to the computer, SCSI 50 pin HD that was more expensive. This means that the connection to one of our lab computers can be difficult. At first I was unsure how we might connect from the 50 pin HD SCSI 2 on the Jaz drive (which I had managed to pick up when cleaning out an office for a retired administrator years ago) to the forensic computer workstation. I realized that our Tableau T3458 forensic bridge has a SCSI 68 pin HD SCSI 3 input. A quick search on the Internet revealed a $4 connector. It came in the mail last week and I pulled it out on Friday and made my first attempt to connect and image. With just a little bit of manipulation, it connected properly. The disk was formatted HFS on a Mac, so I was not able to mount the drive and Windows assumed it need to be formatted. However, I was able to use FTK Imager to create a raw image of the disk that I can open in FTK Imager or FTK. [originally posted by Kevin Glick]