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Worked at a public university. Windows server guru ran a script which had a bug that triggered the wipe of thousands of Windows desktops and some servers on campus.

Being an electronics nerd first, I went around grabbing the hdds (ultimately collected 600+). Took them, a bunch of ATX supplies, and USB adapters to a computer lab. Used some sufficiently thick wire to jump the pins on the PSUs so they’d power up when plugged in.

Plugged in hard drives to lab PCs with USB, into these external power supplies, booted the lab PCs to live USB Linux, ran data recovery over a week, swapping disks as I went. Copied users data to their network drives which was campus policy all along but a lot of people don’t care.

So if your power switch ever breaks on your desktop, use wire to jump pins on the PSU




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