Book Image

Learn Computer Forensics – 2nd edition - Second Edition

By : William Oettinger
Book Image

Learn Computer Forensics – 2nd edition - Second Edition

By: William Oettinger

Overview of this book

Computer Forensics, being a broad topic, involves a variety of skills which will involve seizing electronic evidence, acquiring data from electronic evidence, data analysis, and finally developing a forensic report. This book will help you to build up the skills you need to work in a highly technical environment. This book's ideal goal is to get you up and running with forensics tools and techniques to successfully investigate crime and corporate misconduct. You will discover ways to collect personal information about an individual from online sources. You will also learn how criminal investigations are performed online while preserving data such as e-mails, images, and videos that may be important to a case. You will further explore networking and understand Network Topologies, IP Addressing, and Network Devices. Finally, you will how to write a proper forensic report, the most exciting portion of the forensic exam process. By the end of this book, you will have developed a clear understanding of how to acquire, analyze, and present digital evidence, like a proficient computer forensics investigator.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
15
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16
Index

Understanding filesystems

A hard drive can have multiple partitions on it, and, in each partition, there will be (in most cases) a filesystem. There might be hundreds of thousands to millions of files within a partition. The filesystem tracks where every file is and how much space is available within the partition boundaries.

We discussed sectors earlier in the Hard drives section; they are the smallest units available to store data. The filesystem stores data based on clusters. Clusters are comprised of one or more sectors. A cluster is the smallest allocation unit the filesystem can write to. There are many filesystems available, and some are restricted to specific operating systems unless the user enables drivers that will allow the operating system to read the filesystem.

We will now look at some of the common filesystems you may encounter.

The FAT filesystem

The File Allocation Table (FAT) filesystem has been around since the early days of home computing, and...