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From: Spamlet on 23 Jul 2010 21:19

"Anthony Buckland" <anthonybucklandnospam(a)telus.net> wrote in message
news:qpGdnQf0r_vpi9fRnZ2dnUVZ_tCdnZ2d(a)giganews.com...
> From time to time, we have threads relating to the
> security-conscious destruction of data on a hard drive,
> which has sometimes come down to "physically
> destroy the recording media."
>
> The one time I've actually personally done this, it was
> on a 1995-vintage IBM machine. Breaking into the
> drive to get at the disks was like breaking into a tank.
> I feel that I could have left the drive, intact in its
> housing, in the street for trucks to run over all day with
> no effect other than making the housing dirty. I had
> to grind off the heads of overly numerous screws with
> my Dremel, since they were apparently designed to be
> unscrewed only with some IBM proprietary tool.
>
> I assume laptop drives are somewhat less nuclear-
> hardened, or a laptop would weigh twice as much.
> But I'm reading a suspense novel, in which a woman
> on the good side tries to retrieve a laptop drive from a
> man on the bad side, and as she forcefully drops him
> to the sidewalk, "As he fell to the cobbles, [the drive]
> flew through the air, shattering some feet away." The
> disks prove to be uselessly damaged.
>
> I would have thought that, excepting some unmentioned
> damage to the recording surfaces, the destruction of
> the housings wouldn't have been that catastrophic.
> There are lots of housings in the world, and if you could
> swap the disks and perform arcane synchronization
> tasks, shouldn't it have been possible to retrieve the
> data? If not, then all we would have to do to destroy
> the data on a drive would be to break the housings.
> This seems counterintuitive.

Laptop drives are thin and bend with the laptop.
My partner stood on this Dell and the result was that the drive heads were
quite severely 'parked'.
Ignoring the 'do not unscrew' labels, I took the casing off and found that
after gently lifting the heads and rotating the disc the right way, then
reassembling, the drive then worked. This was very lucky and I wasted no
time in making a clone, but the original never broke down though it was
already old and 'clicky' when it was stood on.

So, for most people, the point is not how secure is the recording medium,
but how good is your ability to find a way of reading it. If you are a law
enforcement agency your chances are probably pretty good.
If you are especially paranoid, write zeros to your discs before you dispose
of them.

S


From: pjp on 24 Jul 2010 01:28
Take em apart. There's usually some pretty small but very powerfull magnets
in there that have some backing plate on them with a field that's very
strange in how they attract and repel each other. Take one apart and if it
has two magnets play with them and you'll see what I mean.

"Anthony Buckland" <anthonybucklandnospam(a)telus.net> wrote in message
news:qpGdnQf0r_vpi9fRnZ2dnUVZ_tCdnZ2d(a)giganews.com...
> From time to time, we have threads relating to the
> security-conscious destruction of data on a hard drive,
> which has sometimes come down to "physically
> destroy the recording media."
>
> The one time I've actually personally done this, it was
> on a 1995-vintage IBM machine. Breaking into the
> drive to get at the disks was like breaking into a tank.
> I feel that I could have left the drive, intact in its
> housing, in the street for trucks to run over all day with
> no effect other than making the housing dirty. I had
> to grind off the heads of overly numerous screws with
> my Dremel, since they were apparently designed to be
> unscrewed only with some IBM proprietary tool.
>
> I assume laptop drives are somewhat less nuclear-
> hardened, or a laptop would weigh twice as much.
> But I'm reading a suspense novel, in which a woman
> on the good side tries to retrieve a laptop drive from a
> man on the bad side, and as she forcefully drops him
> to the sidewalk, "As he fell to the cobbles, [the drive]
> flew through the air, shattering some feet away." The
> disks prove to be uselessly damaged.
>
> I would have thought that, excepting some unmentioned
> damage to the recording surfaces, the destruction of
> the housings wouldn't have been that catastrophic.
> There are lots of housings in the world, and if you could
> swap the disks and perform arcane synchronization
> tasks, shouldn't it have been possible to retrieve the
> data? If not, then all we would have to do to destroy
> the data on a drive would be to break the housings.
> This seems counterintuitive.
>


From: Mike S on 25 Jul 2010 02:52
On 7/23/2010 10:28 PM, pjp wrote:
> Take em apart. There's usually some pretty small but very powerfull magnets
> in there that have some backing plate on them with a field that's very
> strange in how they attract and repel each other. Take one apart and if it
> has two magnets play with them and you'll see what I mean.
<snip>

Yeah those neodymium magnets rock, I think they're the strongest
permanent magnets made. I took some out and they were so strong they
stuck to my hand when one was lying on my palm and the other was on the
back of my hand, I could rotate my hand and they didn't fall off. And
when they're stuck together it's impossible to pull them apart without
twisting and rotating them. If you have kids they'll probably really
like showing them to their friends in school.

http://www.dansdata.com/magnets.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neodymium

How To Hack a hard drive to get Neodymium Magents
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOieVKB_kJM

Mike
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