In this photo provided by Kroll Ontrack Inc., a data drive that fell from the space shuttle Columbia when it was destroyed in 2003 is shown. (File Photo) Photo Gallery>>>

    BEIJING, May 10 (Xinhuanet) -- Precious information was found on a melted disk drive from Columbia space shuttle which broke up while returning to the earth on Feb. 1, 2003, media reported on Saturday.

    The hard drive contained data from the CVX-2 (Critical Viscosity of Xenon) experiment, designed to study the way xenon gas flows in microgravity.

    Like other Columbia debris, the mangled disk drive turned up in Texas. It was six months after the disaster when a NASA contractor sent the drive to Kroll Ontrack, which specializes in data recovery.

    When researchers got it, it was two hunks of metal stuck together. They couldn't even tell it was a hard drive, according to Jon Edwards, an engineer at Kroll Ontrack Inc..

    Luckily, at the core of the drive, the spinning metal platters that actually store data were not warped. They had been gouged and pitted, but the 340-megabyte drive was only half full, and the damage happened where data had not yet been written.

    Edwards attributed that to a lucky twist: The computer was running an ancient operating system, DOS, which does not scatter data all over drives as other approaches do.

    Finally, the data came back about 99 percent complete.

    (Agencies)