Destoy and make unuseable a mechanical HDD without physically damaging it?


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out of curiosity, is there a way to make destroy a mechanical hard drive with physically damaging it?

 

i know flash drives and be written to and they will wear out, but is there something like this for mechanical hard drives?

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if it destroying a hard drive without physically damaging it??  well apparently deleting the MBR master boot record damages it alot. there was a virus that used to do it. not sure if it rendered it completely useless or not but definately had the desired result

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What do you mean by destroy?  Physical destruction is the safest (quickest) way.

 

If you are just looking to 'clear' any data traces, do a multi-pass DOD wipe.

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Put it in a microwave for 5 minutes?

 

You'll probably have an awesome fireworks display and burn out your microwave though. :laugh:

 

 

Edit : Actually that counts as physical damage. Still cool to try though.

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no offense but wasn't there another topic exactly like this one a couple weeks ago (i don't think it was by this OP though) that ended up getting locked because everyone was suspicious?

 

edit: yep, found it https://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/1168885-ruin-a-mechanical-hard-drive-without-physically-damaging-it/

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If you mean to make it look like it has never been tampered with and almost instantly damaged then yes. Put the HDD in a steamer and then leave it in a hit but very humid and damp area. This will crap it up. 

Another way to make it so it can still be read but damaged and have it come up as failing. would be give power to the HDD then heat it up with a hair dryer or stick it in oven (must be turned on with power still). This will cause drive to overheat. Normally it will still spin up but come up with crap loads of errors sometimes it wont work at all. 

Another way.. Drop it. 

I am not sure exactly what you mean by the question though if you want to wipe a HDD then use http://www.dban.org/ This is write over the driver a number of times and make everything unrecoverable. The drive will still work at the end of this. 

Oh another way would be firmware update on the hard drive during update pull the SATA lead / power.

 

If you are trying to stop police or something from seeing what is on the HDD fast then a large magnet or using http://www.truecrypt.org/ are your best options. I recommend TrueCrypt.. at least that way you can still use the HDD if its a false alarm and when they find ###### all. 

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no offense but wasn't there another topic exactly like this one a couple weeks ago (i don't think it was by this OP though) that ended up getting locked because everyone was suspicious?

 

Yes, there was one like this a few weeks ago.

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first thread was started by user NEOhelp

this thread was started by user  gigaWIN

 

same guy

:laugh:

I think you're reaching there...

But let's get a mod to check just in case! :P

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out of curiosity, is there a way to make destroy a mechanical hard drive with physically damaging it?

 

i know flash drives and be written to and they will wear out, but is there something like this for mechanical hard drives?

I wrote an application that kept the write head in the same place of a hard disk and would eventually scratch it, rendering it useless.

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EMP should do it. No sign of external physical damange but insides are fried.

 

Detonating a tactical nuke in orbit should achieve this. 

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Detonating a tactical nuke in orbit should achieve this. 

although a fried internal is still physical damage.

 

i can't think of *any* way of destroying an HDD without physically damaging or altering it in some way. the best you can do is get rid of all the data on it, but it's still usable.

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Wipe of all data using Eraser with 1000s of cycles and keep doing it until the electronics can no longer take it.

 

You can't make something not usable without damaging it in a very little way somewhere. Especially Hard Drives as they are made quite solid.

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Hello,

 

I can think of a number of ways to accomplish this, depending upon your skillset, tool availability and, of course, budget.

 

If you can tell me a little more about your requirements I can give a more detailed answer.

 

 

Regards,

 

Aryeh Goretsky

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