Ever look inside a hard drive?

kamakiri · **Posted:** June 21st, 2007, 8:39 am

meesekiller wrote:

Unless it was an electromagnet...it probably wasn't high power enough. Popular Mechanics recommends physically drilling holes in the disk. Hard drives are like black boxes they are virtually indestructible these days. And HCl would probably work too.

Just about any magnet will not do anything to the platters. Since they are essentially glass, HCL would do nothing, and drilling would have to be done VERY carefully.

Drilling an unopened HD would work well as the glass shards would remain inside of the case, but trying it on the platters alone is foolish at best and dangerous at the worst.

Adbot · **Posted:** June 21st, 2007, 8:39 am

Christopher · **Posted:** June 21st, 2007, 2:14 pm

kamakiri wrote:

meesekiller wrote:

Unless it was an electromagnet...it probably wasn't high power enough. Popular Mechanics recommends physically drilling holes in the disk. Hard drives are like black boxes they are virtually indestructible these days. And HCl would probably work too.

Just about any magnet will not do anything to the platters. Since they are essentially glass, HCL would do nothing, and drilling would have to be done VERY carefully.

Drilling an unopened HD would work well as the glass shards would remain inside of the case, but trying it on the platters alone is foolish at best and dangerous at the worst.

That is what I meant sorry. The PM article recommended drilling the four holes through the entire hard drive, not the individual platters.

Lance · **Posted:** July 1st, 2007, 5:44 pm

I am linking this as this was what I talked about in the last update. And also the platters are also warped badly so even if it could and if it had tracks well... they wouldn't read now.

Christopher · **Posted:** July 4th, 2007, 11:12 pm

Lance wrote:

I am linking this as this was what I talked about in the last update. And also the platters are also warped badly so even if it could and if it had tracks well... they wouldn't read now.

The government has ways of getting data out of even the most warped messed up hard drives, ideally, you don't want toe the hard drive to exist when you are done with it.