On Sun, Apr 5, 2009 at 2:32 AM, Kyle Hansen <[email protected]> wrote:
> On 4/4/09 3:57 PM, "Wallace Adrian D'Alessio" <[email protected]> > Broadcast into the ether: > > Kyle, it was my opinion that a strong enough mag field would erase all > formatting and make it unusable. Another lister was of the opinion that > since these are SCSI they could still be reformatted. What do you think? > > I had an IDE external wrongly low level formatted at the university iT guy > recently. It has been brain dead since. > But then it is not SCSI. I havn't dealt with SCSI for a while so I can't > remember the ins and outs but it seems I had to worry about sector mapping > even on SCSI. > > > It was my job for about 3 months at Lawrence Livermore Laboratories > (science and weapons development). We literally had to securely destroy > hundreds of Mac’s and PC’s during their upgrade. We did so “lovingly.” > Instead of just tossing the entire units into the gigantic (think 4 > dumpsters big) metallic shredder we removed the drives and got permission to > donate them to charities and non profits and even give some to our friends > and such. AS LONG AS THE HARD DRIVES WERE GONE AND THE FLOPPY DRIVES ALSO > REMOVED. Caps on purpose. We found at the complex a degauser that > literally had a handle and was smaller than a dustbuster. I wish I knew how > it worked. It was beige. It had a coiled AC cord. It was rectangular and > the handle was on the top. Below the handle was about 4 inches of > something. So picture a rectangle with a handle on top. About 8 inches > long and 4 inches wide with a cord and a button you depressed with your > thumb. > A " T " shaped handle? Sounds like a degausser I bought years ago when reel to reel was popular I still have it. it's a big electromagnet. Since scheduling time a nd use of the metal shredder was really > complicated...different area of the facility, security clearances etc we > used this “thing” do DESTROY hard disks. They were rendered USELESS in an > instant. We would take out the floppy and smash it with a 3lb. Sledge, the > set the degausser on top of the drive and hit the button, wait 3 seconds or > so and blam. Gone. Dead. Since this was relatively new (1995?) we had to > have it tested to make sure the data really was gone. This was weapon > development stuff. Serious top secret stuff. We gave the drive to the > forensic data recovery guy and said “go for it.” About a week later he He > came back to our little testing are and literally said to us, and I remember > it like it was yesterday “what did you and Trevor do to this drive?” He > could not get a single bit of info off of it. It was the first drive he had > ever had do this to him. He was flabbergasted. We got the clearance and > just started popping these drives one after the other. Hard drives are just > devices with a controller board that have metallic discs inside that have > have a sector positively or negatively charged to create a 1 or a 0. This > little device did something so catastrophic to the drives that they were > rendered useless. And the data guys pulled the platters and put them on > recovery units to see if we had just damaged the controller board. > Sometimes we would stack up hard drives and play bowling. Or > dominoes...your tax dollars at work. > > The magnetic signal written to a sector can be read (remnants of it) even > after writing zero’s to it more than 10 times. It is just more difficult > and takes more time. What they do now is layer the zero writes and follow > the patterns under them. Similar to digging in sedimentary soil. You are > looking for a 1 inch layer of quartz but there is no quartz to be found. So > you dig deeper and deeper and deeper until you find the layer of quartz (or > information in this case) and then you set up the unit to data mine or real > world mine at that level. I can’t wait for the new organic drives to come > out. I wonder how we will accomplish the same thing? > > The moral of the story is that you probably can not safely EVER remove the > data off of a hard disc. Writing Zero’s to it once will deter 99.99% of > most people. I hand drives off after one write all the time. But if you > ever want to truly make a drive unreadable take it out back and bash it into > little pieces. It can be fun. Anyone see the printer scene in “Office > Space.” > Diane wanted to resell them. So she needs to erase without making a change that would render them useless EXCEPT she has no way to nuke and pave SCSI. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed Low End Mac's G3-5 List, a group for those using G3, G4, and G5 desktop Macs - with a particular focus on Power Macs. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/g3-5-list?hl=en Low End Mac RSS feed at feed://lowendmac.com/feed.xml -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
