Destroying hard drives and contents

the only bit I worry about is the drive. The last security conference I was at someone had bought drives for sale in Nigeria at a market stall and they were being marketed as "contains Windows and much interesting data".

I remember buying my first hard drive for an A2000, it was a 42MB Seagate MFM encoded drive, 5.25" half height. It had an odd controller that consisted of a standard PC 8 bit ISA card, piggybacked onto a full length Zorro II card. IIRC the cost was pushing £400 all in at one of the computer shows in the Novotel.

Well, they *are* large, but not for their age. RL02...

They're also quite brittle and the pieces are very sharp...

Well.......

In the end I did go for the Mapp gas approach and spent a happy half hour in the garden with a small brick hearth blasting away.

I didn't realise from the video that the metal actually melts but it certainly does. There are some quite pretty colours as well. Perhaps I could sell the results as art.

Thinking about the responses to this topic and the different ideas, I am wondering whether the chosen methods are a throwback to childhood and the classical elements of earth, water, wind and fire.

When I was a kid, I used to enjoy playing with water and liked to watch bonfires. I wasn't that interested in digging or flying kites.

Water wasn't really going to work for the destruction exercise, unless one stretches a point and considers acid.

Interacting with earth in the broadest sense often involves hitting it in some way, so I wonder whether those who suggested submitting the platters to a bashing liked digging etc. as kids.

Equally, I could be talking bollocks, but trick cyclists get paid a lot for this type of thing.

Club hammer as already mentioned. But first it might be interesting to power a drive up with the casing removed and wait for (or induce) a head-crash.

I keep an old platter as a rather nice desk ornament which double-up as a pretty good front-silvered mirror for sorting out contact-lens problems.

My mum used to work as a secretary for the Local Education Authority. Apparently the occasional session of hard drive bashing in the car park came under "other duties as assigned" - there was a hammer in the office for the purpose.

Pete

Is that a form of data compression?

If you have an old drive which has an "SS" (Self Seek) jumper on it, you can just power the drive up with this in place and the heads will continually perform fast seeks in various patterns (which in some cases can be changed by setting other jumpers). This was used to demonstrate drives with clear covers at exhibitions. I have an old

Damn, I wish I'd known about this. I must have trashed dozens of drives, always thinking "Is there anything I can *do* with these.

Hmmm. Add a stylus to the head and it almost becomes an electromechanical Spirograph. That might satisfy James May and make the drive unreadable as a bonus.

You want to be careful about the loose bits - they send them to eastern europe where factories of workers stick them back into bytes.

Before you know it they have kilobytes of your data! Scary. I read it in the Daily Mail or something.

Darren

It's far worse than that. Some of the motherboards still had memory on them and there can be a lot of data stored on those.

In article , Andy Hall scribeth thus

What in RAM memory?..

You can't be too careful.....

Seriously .. how long does it stay charged up for?..

I've seen video RAM retain contents, somewhat corrupted but still perfectly readable, for over an hour.

Depends what it is, about 64ms.

However the PRAM on Macs can hold information for 2-3 years.

Once upon a time I had a bug report that the machines weren't running the POST with the new memory. A visit to the factory was required to sort it out.

It turned out that SOP was to power the newly built machine up to check it started, turn it off again, disconnect it, carry it to the soak test rack, plug it all in, then turn it on.

The DRAM still held the little marker I put in it to show that POST had already started(1). Why did we bother with refresh cycles?

Andy

(1) Deliberately, "started" not "completed" so you could skip the POST if you really wanted to.