The Treatment of PCs

Abstract

Up to this point, we have concentrated in the book on the technicalissues: on how computers work and their construction; on how informationis stored; and, in particular, on how and where information can behidden or inadvertently left on hard disk drives. This technicalunderstanding gives us both the knowledge and the confidence thatwill enable us to find information of evidential value from a PC.However, unless we carry out the investigative processes in wayswhichguarantee the integrity of that evidence, it is unlikely to be admissiblein court. Thus we now need to concern ourselves with perhaps themost important part of all: the processes that we need to carry outand the practices that we need to observe in order to extract informationfrom PCs and present it as admissible evidence in court.