I am at my local thrift store not long ago and was walking down in the electronics section when I notice this silver box sitting on the shelf. Now I recognize the shape of this box, looks a lot like the size and dimensions of an external hard drive. Now, I am the curious type and could not pass up the opportunity to see what might have been left behind, also for about $5.00 including the power supply – I can think of worse ways to spend a curious weekend.
Getting the drive home I break out the USB write blocker and Kali laptop – way nerdy, yes… but just in case there might be something ugly living on the drive… I get everything connected, hit the switch on the box and the lights come on, good sign, but I do not see the drive showing up on the laptop. Ok, so maybe the write blocker is causing an issue and keeping the drive from showing up. I remove the blocker and connect the silver box directly and .. nope. I can see the enclosure if I run an lsusb command (to list USB devices), but anywhere else.
So then (while not a good idea) I decide I will take the chance and plug the box into a windows computer. Again, nothing – I can hear the USB being detected but the drive will not connect. Checking disk management I see the drive!
When I try to initialize it … Fail.
Grabbing a screwdriver I pop the enclosure open and pull the hard drive out. Connecting it up with a hard drive dock and the Kali machine and … the drive is there … Twice or, 2 partitions. One partition is blank, the other has someone’s downloaded audio books – complete with the torrent files from the download.
The mystery of the silver box is solved! A portable hard drive that someone was using for downloading audio books. The trouble with reading the drive in the enclosure turned out to be components failing in the enclosure (probably why it ended up at a thrift store) but a working SATA hard drive – I am not not much of a fan of the audio book titles, so the drive got a good cleaning before a final destination in the parts bin.