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Forensic Lab Resources

Name

Institution
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The typical equipment for the forensic lab will be tape drive, CD drive as well as

removable advanced drive bays. A good monitor will also be essential for the work station. I will

also need extra hard disk to use it in installation of various OSes on the physical drives and more

memory for boosting the performance of the forensic tools as well as CD-RW for copying files

(Genco Elizabeth, 2002).

It is essential to now choose operating system. The OS should use at least flavor of

Linux, one Windows and two OSes. However, I will install RedHat 7.1 and Windows 98.

Installing the two OSes on different disks ensure easy recovery of the bad disk or corrupted

partition faster. Thus, two OSes gives more flexibility asS well as wider tools selection. Most of

packages are expensive but some of them can be found in demo versions. Some of the other tools

which will be needed will be as follows:

 EnCase- It will enable examination of files including the unallocated data and

deleted files.

 SafeBack- It will help in creating and restoring images of hard disk with altering

the data. It is fast and it can make copies from one hard disk to another.

 Data Dumper (DD) - It will help in forensic duplication. Using it with proper

Linux configured system prevents any accidental alteration of forensic data.

 Quick View Plus- it is from Jasc Software and will help in opening more than 200

files. It is valuable forensic tool as mostly strange files will be encountered and

will help in sorting them.

 Md5sum- It will help in hashing disks and files to ensure that they have not been

tampered during analysis.

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 Winhex- will help in RAM and disk editing. It also has many other features like

imaging and recovery of deleted data.

All these resources will help in setting cost-effective and efficient working forensic lab.
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References

Genco, Elizabeth A. ( April, 2002). Do's and don'ts of building a forensics workstation.

Retrieved from: http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/feature/Dos-and-donts-of-building-

a-forensics-workstation