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Anonymous
Recovering messages from answering machine destroyed by power surge 2017-04-06 01:33:41 Post No. 1156761
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Recovering messages from answering machine destroyed by power surge 2017-04-06 01:33:41 Post No. 1156761
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Recovering messages from answering machine destroyed by power surge
Anonymous
2017-04-06 01:33:41
Post No. 1156761
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Back when we were kids in middle school, I was staying the night at my friends house during a really bad
thunderstorm. We were upstairs playing SNES games when lightning hit a power line nearby and knocked the
power out. I remember the whole house lighting up like it was the middle of the day and then the power
just went out.
A lot of the electronics in the house were ruined, including the SNES and the TV, which pissed my friend
off pretty badly as his parents couldn't replace the system until after all the insurance BS was sorted
out.
His parents had an old Radio Shack TAD 1006 answering machine (one of the early digital models) and it
was fried, too. There were some important messages from his grandparents that he had wanted to keep on
there since they had passed away earlier that year, which really bummed him out that he'd lost those
messages.
Yeah, well, anyway, they'd sent the machine off to someone who was good with electronics to try to fix
the machine but he ended up skipping town (for some unrelated reason) and the answering machine was never
returned after that.
Last year my friend asked me if I remembered that night and I said of course, that's when your SNES and
stuff got fried from lighting. He told me that the guy who skipped town had his house go up for sale as
some point and, long story, but my friend ended up getting that old answering machine back.
We have another mutual friend who's into electronics and he volunteered to take a crack at maybe getting
the data off the memory chips in the machine using a Raspberry Pi. He was able to do it but he didn't
have much luck getting anything useful out of the memory dump.
We thought it might be worthwhile to see if anyone else
with better computer skills can make any sense of it.
http://s000.tinyupload.com/index.php?file_id=37810547663808529247
>>
> A lot of the electronics in the house were ruined...
It really pisses me off when people throw out an entire house of electronics because of a power surge. Most things that plug into the wall have a fuse on the PCB somewhere. It will blow in a power surge and protect the rest of the unit from damage. Your friend could have probably saved all his equipment with a soldering iron and a dollar of parts.
>>
>>1156764
>Most things that plug into the wall have a fuse on the PCB somewhere. It will blow in a power surge and protect the rest of the unit from damage.
>lightning strike
Most electronic devices are damaged by the surge before the fuse blows.
>>
>>1156764
Fuses are not made for protecting against surges, they would blow after the voltage has risen so far already that a multiple of the standard current is running for a prolonged period, meaning the internals will be fried long before the fuse blows. Fuses exist to prevent fire after an internal short causing too much current to be drawn. There are devices able to protect against surges, but most of the times lightning strikes are still powerful enough to obliterate the boldest of measures. Infrastructure is way more important for protection against lightning, a time ago I witnessed a strike into a TV distribution device, and no appliances were friend in the neighborhood, even the digital tv decoders were intact, and more impressive: that same night internet and tv were fixed again.
>>
Post picture of the PCB so I can see what chips are we talking about. As RadioShack is exclusive to the US, we don't have access to the machine from the rest of the world.
¿Any luck finding the same machine on eBay and swapping the EEPROM chip?
>>
Quick update, the answering machine stores messages on RAM. It has a backup battery that needs to be in to store messages. Since that's a 20 year old machine, chances are, if there was any battery in, at some point it died and took with it all your messages.
What your friend dumped is probably the voice prompt ROM as that machine has that feature.
Also the dump is incomplete.
>>
the message seems to be someone saying they are from the year 2038 and are giving coordinates near middletown ohio
is this a trick op?
>>
>>1156761
>>/x/
>my friend can dump memory from an old answering machine but can't import a raw file into audacity and hear the audio
I wasted like 10 minutes because I thought it was for a good cause. Fuck you OP.
>>
>>1158567
I'm near Middletown. Unless something changes drastically, no one from there will be sober enough to time travel ANY time in the next 50 years.
>>
>>1158570
Kek
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