H20 CHALLENGE: Save a Lost Message

By popsci Posted 03.02.2007 at 11:48 am 2 Comments

Hate to kick off the blog on a sad note, but it raises an interesting hacker challenge: A good friend of ours recently lost his father, and worse, he accidentally erased the last message his dad left him on his digital answering machine, an AT&T model 1820. Understandably, he's desperate to get it back, and he has disconnected the machine so that nothing would be recorded over it. So far, one data-recovery firm told us they couldn't help unless the machine used removable flash memory, which doesn't need power to hold information and from which information can usually be salvaged. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to use any kind of flash memory; we found this forum post suggesting it may be something more akin to RAM.

Anyone have any experience with this or any suggestions, we'd love to hear about them in the comments. —Mike Haney

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2 Comments

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popsci

01/04/08 at 9:32 pm

Try call the phone company to see if they "snooped" (recorded) the message into their system. Many companies often do this to have forensic evidence in cases where a recording may matter.

Good luck!

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Ann Zahn

03/17/08 at 9:07 am

Please LET ME KNOW if you do find a solution. My mom died suddenly last month and I saved the recorded message between her and my daughter. I even put in a brand new battery, but the machine registers no messages. I don't know who can do this, but this is priceless to me.