Tigrael

Geologist here. I have some old hard drive platters and access to a scanning electron microscope. Anyone want me to try this and post pictures?

EDIT: Obligatory RIP inbox. Okay, if I can find the platters by Sunday I'll do it this weekend; else it might be a few days because our big yearly conference is coming up (AGU for those in the know) so SEM time is becoming a precious resource.

EDIT 2 SATURDAY NIGHT (LIVE) EDITION: I've got some time scheduled for Wednesday night!

EDIT 3: Thank you kind Swedish-speaking stranger for the gold.

EDIT 4 FEELING GOOD ON A WEDNESDAY: Got the pictures, will post them by Saturday when I'm done being busy with Thanksgiving things. I wasn't able to focus well enough to see what we wanted; I'm going to see if I can get one of the people in the department good at taking wicked high magnification pics to help out. I took some images of other things though that I think are cool, so there'll at least be SOME pretty pictures this week. Stay tuned!

Yeah! This SEM is brand new (we got it this past January) and definitely has a digital camera. I have no idea what I'm doing in terms of data recovery since I usually just look at rocks, but I'll try out the various instruments (backscatter, secondary electron, cathodoluminescene, color cathodoluminescence, and EDAX just for fun). Worst case scenario we'll just have a really cool image of the surface of a disk drive platter.