[mirimir]

It's changing magnetic fields that wipe HDDs. Such as powerful electromagnets.

In a clean (enough) room, they could have opened the drive, and just poked the actuator arm.

Decades ago, I had a HDD that wouldn't spin up unless I nudged the platter with a pencil erasor. Very near the center, of course. There was a hole in the case, in just the right place, with Al tape over it.

[pontifier]

Doesn't even have to be a very clean room... I played around with an old 1 gig drive years ago. My friends and I opened up the case so we could watch the drive doing it's thing. We did a fresh os install and watched as it formatted the disk and copied files. The head was remarkably strong, and would move so fast it looked like it was in 2 places at once while copying files. It was fun to stick a screwdriver between the 2 ghostly write arms, and have the screwdriver almost knocked from your hand, while the drive went on like nothing had happened. It ran for weeks before it died.

I've also stuck a 3 1/4" floppy disk to a huge 2"x2"x5" neodimium magnet with no ill effects. The drive was able to read it fine afterwards with the same md5 hash of the contents.

[tjoff]

I'd say it needs to be pretty clean. Back in the day it was a thing to remove the hard-drive cover and replace it with plexiglass. Once densities got to around 100 GB (don't remember the specifics but somewhere around 100 */2) it turned out that noone was successful with even momentarily open the drive chassi without ruining some part of the platter due to dust.

[4ad]

My first HDD has a 540MB drive, I ran DOS. Eventually I upgraded to newer computers, and I opened the old drive, and put in on the wall on display. It stood there for at least a decade, possible 15 years, before I moved to a different country. Before leaving, I decided to connect the old drive to a computer, just for kicks.

Remarkably, I could read data off it. Not much, file i/o mostly ended up in failure, but I could at least see the file structure. I did not expect this.

[mirimir]

That's very cool. Maybe I'll try it, just for lulz.

> I've also stuck a 3 1/4" floppy disk to a huge 2"x2"x5" neodimium magnet with no ill effects. The drive was able to read it fine afterwards with the same md5 hash of the contents.

Right.

But thinking of EvanAnderson's anecdote, maybe a permanent magnet near a spinning platter is a changing magnetic field, from the perspective of the platter surface.

Still, with the platter inside a steel case, you'd need a very strong permanent magnet, held very close.

[gist]

That's pretty cool. I had a few old drives and on purpose took them apart. So far I was not able to duplicate what you were able to do (this was last month). I had an idea that it might work in some way. Glad that you can confirm it did at least when you tried.

[commandlinefan]

If you videoed any of that, I'd love to watch it on youtube (or somewhere).