Introduction

The following procedure will guide you through installing Blade for the first time.  Please ensure that you close all other applications before starting.

Operating System Requirements

Blade^® has been designed to work on the Microsoft^® Windows^® platform in either a 32 or 64 bit environment.  It has been tested on the following versions of Windows:

• Windows XP
• Server 2003
• Vista
• Windows 7
• Server 2008
• Server 2008 R2
• Blade also requires Microsoft .Net Framework v2

Latest Release

Prior to installing Blade, please ensure you have obtained the latest release. There is on-going product research and development which provides new features, important updates and bug fixes. Please check the change log for details of those changes.

The release history and change log can be found here:

• Release Notes

The latest download link for Blade can be found on the front page of the Blade Documents page:

• BLADE1

Digitally Signed Software

Software vendors can digitally sign and timestamp the software they distribute. The code signing process ensures the end user knows the digitally signed software is legitimate, comes from a known software vendor and the code has not been tampered with since being published.  If the Authenticode Digital Signature is not valid, or the MD5 hash provided at the point of download does not match, please do not install the software.

All the software products published by Digital Detective have been digitally signed. This ensures that when you use our software, you can verify that it has not been tampered with and is a product developed and released by Digital Detective Group.  The following Knowledge Base article explains this further and shows you how to verify the integrity of forensic grade software:

• Authenticode Digitally Signed Software

Running Setup

Now that you have verified the integrity of the setup file (all the individual executables have also been digitally signed) you can install the software.  You will note that each release has been named using the version/build information (see Figure 1).

Figure 1

Good forensic practice dictates that you archive each release of Blade and each carving profile that you use on a forensic case.  This ensures that at any time in the future, you can install a specific version and carving profile, and replicate your results.  When you run Setup, you will be prompted to select a language.  This language selector is for the installation only and does not change the language used by Blade (which is currently English).

Figure 2

Select the appropriate language and click OK to launch the Setup Wizard (as shown in Figure 3).

Figure 3

End User Licence Agreement

The next screen (Figure 4) displays the End User Licence Agreement.  Please read this carefully.  If you wish to review or print a copy of this agreement, it can be found in our knowledge base:

• End User Licence Agreement 

Figure 4

If you accept the agreement, please select the appropriate option and click ‘Next’.  The next screen (Figure 5) prompts you to select a location in which to install Blade.

Figure 5

The next screen (Figure 6) shows the location of the Start Menu folder where the icons for the software will be placed.  The default location for Blade is in a folder called Digital Detective.  You will find all our released products in this location.

Figure 6

The next screen (Figure 7) shows the additional installation tasks and gives you the option to create an icon on your Desktop.

Figure 7

The next screen (Figure 8) shows a summary of the installation tasks prior to launching the installation process.

Figure 8

The final screen (Figure 9) shows that the Blade Setup Wizard has completed.  At this point, you may be asked to reboot your workstation.  Please ensure this is done before you try and use Blade.

Figure 9

Default File Locations

The default installation folders for Blade are shown in Table 1 below. 

Table 1