In the courtroom six months later, the defense attorney challenged the methodology. "Isn't this software ancient, Detective? Version 7?"
She double-clicked the icon: .
The server room hummed with the sterile white noise of forced air. Detective Sarah Chen, a forensic examiner with twelve years on the job, slid a ruggedized USB dongle into her workstation. The LED on the dongle glowed green. This was the key.
Today’s case was State v. Morrison , a financial fraud investigation involving a destroyed laptop. The suspect had attempted a "factory reset" on a high-end Dell Precision—an x64 machine running Windows 10 Enterprise. But Sarah knew that a reset was not a wipe.
She used the function—a built-in, C-like scripting language unique to EnCase. A custom script she wrote in 2018, called Find-Offset-By-Date , quickly isolated all files last accessed within one hour of the suspect’s termination date.
As the image wrote to an evidence drive, the ran in the background. It carved for known file signatures (JPEGs, PDFs, ZIPs) and performed a quick Entropy Test to identify encrypted or compressed data. The log showed a red flag: an 80 GB block of high entropy—likely a VeraCrypt container.
She connected a write-blocker to the suspect’s NVMe SSD. The drive capacity: 1 terabyte. Using EnCase 7.09’s module, she selected a Linux DD (raw) format, verified by both MD5 and SHA-1 hashes. The x64-native engine hummed, utilizing the full 16 GB of RAM on her workstation. The old 32-bit versions would choke on a drive this large; version 7.09, built for x64, handled the 1 TB stream with ease.