The present invention concerns an electronic forensic tool for conducting
electronic discovery and computer forensic analysis. The present invention allows a non-technical person such as a non-forensic expert to conduct
electronic discovery and thereby obviate the need for an expert in many situations. The present invention allows for
electronic discovery in a forensically sound manner. The present invention also concerns a business method for electronic discovery involving a
software program and a command
server for generating expanded functionality. The
client software may be distributed at minimal or no cost, preferably as a CD. Using the
client software, a user boots a target
machine to determine whether a target
machine contains data of interest. The
client software will, however, only display limited data such as file information, date, last modified, and
file size. To access and examine the actual underlying data, the user must obtain additional functionality, e.g. by
purchasing a command block from the control
server. The additional functionality will allow the client program to extract the data of interest or the entire contents of the target
machine to an external device for further analysis.