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You're reading from  Learn Computer Forensics

Product typeBook
Published inApr 2020
PublisherPackt
ISBN-139781838648176
Edition1st Edition
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William Oettinger
William Oettinger
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William Oettinger

William Oettinger is a veteran technical trainer and investigator. He is a retired police officer with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department and a retired CID agent with the United States Marine Corps. He is a professional with over 20 years of experience in academic, local, military, federal, and international law enforcement organizations, where he acquired his multifaceted experience in IT, digital forensics, security operations, law enforcement, criminal investigations, policy, and procedure development. He has earned an MSc from Tiffin University, Ohio. When not working, he likes to spend time with his wife and his three miniature schnauzers.
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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 contained 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, and they are the smallest units that are available to store data. The filesystem stores data based on clusters. Clusters are one or more sectors. A cluster is the smallest allocation unit the filesystem can write to. Now, 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...

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Learn Computer Forensics
Published in: Apr 2020Publisher: PacktISBN-13: 9781838648176

Author (1)

author image
William Oettinger

William Oettinger is a veteran technical trainer and investigator. He is a retired police officer with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department and a retired CID agent with the United States Marine Corps. He is a professional with over 20 years of experience in academic, local, military, federal, and international law enforcement organizations, where he acquired his multifaceted experience in IT, digital forensics, security operations, law enforcement, criminal investigations, policy, and procedure development. He has earned an MSc from Tiffin University, Ohio. When not working, he likes to spend time with his wife and his three miniature schnauzers.
Read more about William Oettinger