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 Effed
Registered: 05/15/02
Posts: 7,370
Loc: Daylight Slavings
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 Electromagnetic Hard Drive Erasing? 
#1681218 - 07/02/03 06:35 PM (20 years, 9 months ago) |
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I have had no luck in my search for these devices.
Ive only read about them. I forget where.
Im talking about a little box that mounts to the side of your computer, and when you flip a switch and the magnet formats the drives completely.
I am thinking about building such a device or purchasing one.
The fact is I havent the slightest clue where to begin.
Any help would be nice.
Thanks
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 debianlinux
Myconerd - DBK
Registered: 12/09/02
Posts: 8,334
Loc: Over There
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 Re: Electromagnetic Hard Drive Formatting. [Re: Effed]
#1681284 - 07/02/03 07:12 PM (20 years, 9 months ago) |
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well, the 1st problem i see is shielding the magnet so that it busts the hdd but nothing else. your terminology is erroneous. formatting implies structure. you are referring to a blanket erasing. the 1st two consumer objects that come to my mind are bulk tape erasers and degaussing coils. a degaussing coil can be made pretty simply if your aim is to simply scatter polarities on a drive. make your coil about the width of a drive and simply set the drive in the center and flip the switch. i think the hardest part would be ascertaining success. just because the drive fails to boot or whatnot doesn't mean the uber-police with their cleanrooms and techs can't still derive data you thought was obliterated.
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Effed
Registered: 05/15/02
Posts: 7,370
Loc: Daylight Slavings
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Re: Electromagnetic Hard Drive Formatting. [Re: debianlinux]
#1681756 - 07/02/03 10:24 PM (20 years, 9 months ago) |
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Thank you for the informative post sir. 
The search goes on.... 
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Effed
Registered: 05/15/02
Posts: 7,370
Loc: Daylight Slavings
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Re: Electromagnetic Hard Drive Formatting. [Re: debianlinux]
#1681763 - 07/02/03 10:27 PM (20 years, 9 months ago) |
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And when it comes down to it I dont care if a damages this Dell peice of shit... Even though its still not paid for.
I dont even have anything that illegal on my drives other than music..
I just want a "way out" in case its ever needed.
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psilofan
Question Sleep
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Re: Electromagnetic Hard Drive Formatting. [Re: Effed]
#1684915 - 07/03/03 08:29 PM (20 years, 9 months ago) |
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I have one.
Its called a bulk demagnitizer.
Look around the web or on ebay or media erasers
they plug in and the magnet isnt a magnet until its flipped on back in the day they were used to erase media reels, vhs tapes, and audio tapes, they do a number on drives - powerful magnetic fields cause the data to be annihilated and to make matters worse its strong enough to make the read write heads which are only microns away to begin with crash into the platters fubar'ing them forever....this is a permenant end to a drive so be careful
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Effed
Registered: 05/15/02
Posts: 7,370
Loc: Daylight Slavings
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Re: Electromagnetic Hard Drive Formatting. [Re: psilofan]
#1685542 - 07/04/03 01:12 AM (20 years, 9 months ago) |
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Thank you I shall read more on this.
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micro
bunbun has a gungun
Registered: 05/09/03
Posts: 7,532
Loc: Brick City
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Re: Electromagnetic Hard Drive Formatting. [Re: Effed]
#1685689 - 07/04/03 02:18 AM (20 years, 9 months ago) |
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A magnet will definately erase a hard drive, but debianlinux is right -- bits will *probably* still be in line, and I'm sure there are really complicated algorithms out there (i.e. a phi equation to relate the frequency of occurances of patterns like people do in decrypting text messages) to fill in some or most of the blanks. I would imagine a magnet would have to be *really* strong in order to be able to be mounted on the side of a computer and completely polarize the whole disk.
Another alternative is secure file wiping. You can get a program like PGP to do this (I always reccomend an older version like 2.6.2, just because the files are signed and the source code was made available to the public so crypto-privacy freaks could make sure there were no back doors.) It basically erases everything by rewriting over the data with random garbage. The only problem you have to worry about then is RAM, which can be solved by a simple reboot (or disconnecting the battery if you are extremely paranoid, but a reboot should do the trick.) All of this can be done with a single batch file which you can run when needed.
Another thing to possibly look into is hard disk encryption. Again, I really believe the RSA and DSS (128-bit) algorithms themselves to be secure; the only concern would be the integrity of the encryption program itself, the integrity of your passphrase and RAM, of course, (unless you are talking about encrypting actual programs that were installed that leave crap all over the place.)
If you want to build an electromagnet, all it is is a wire coiled (a lot) around a metal core, with the two ends + and - but again, you'd have to build a really strong electromagnet. You'd want the majority of the force along the radius of the platters, I would imagine.
Just my opinion,
--
Micro
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matts
matts
Registered: 01/28/02
Posts: 3,649
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[Re: micro]
#1686020 - 07/04/03 08:34 AM (20 years, 9 months ago) |
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mntlfngrs
The Art of Casterbation
Registered: 07/18/02
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Re: Electromagnetic Hard Drive Formatting. [Re: matts]
#1687043 - 07/04/03 09:33 PM (20 years, 9 months ago) |
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He's talking about scrambling other stuff (bios) when the magnet is activated.
I wnated to suggest wrapping the hard drive itself with copper wire and hooking it to a switch and power, but I'm sure that would cause interferance of some sort even when not powered.
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Be all and you'll be to end all
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matts
matts
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mntlfngrs
The Art of Casterbation
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Re: Electromagnetic Hard Drive Formatting. [Re: matts]
#1689085 - 07/05/03 10:40 PM (20 years, 9 months ago) |
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Wont a magnetic field generate a current in any circuitry?
Tunneling is used to alter the placement of electrons in the floating gate. An electrical charge, usually 10 to 13 volts, is applied to the floating gate. The charge comes from the column, or bitline, enters the floating gate and drains to a ground.
Maybe it wouldn't generate the 10-13 volts required
Put a magnet on your bios chip and tell us what happens.
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Be all and you'll be to end all
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matts
matts
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Posts: 3,649
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whiterasta
Day careobserver
Registered: 04/09/02
Posts: 1,780
Loc: Oregon
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Re: Electromagnetic Hard Drive Formatting. [Re: matts]
#1690271 - 07/06/03 02:14 PM (20 years, 9 months ago) |
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Sheesh! All you tech heads havn't figured out that wiring the tranformer and magnetron from a microwave oven in the case with a remote control( you want to be out of room for this fry job)will literaly Blow the pooch to smithereens. A half dozen fine wire turns around the hard drive unit will ensure complete anihilation of all data when pulsed with .9kw of unsheilded microwave energy.This IS the final solution and can even be set up as a booby trap  to fry the attempeted intrusion without password(OOPS! also doses the intruder with a big load of microwaves)
This will dramaticaly destroy a computer(Sparks,smoke,etc)forever.
WR
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To old for this place
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matts
matts
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biglo
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Re: Electromagnetic Hard Drive Formatting. [Re: whiterasta]
#1694497 - 07/07/03 08:55 PM (20 years, 9 months ago) |
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Yeah, just stick the hard drive in a microwave, that should do the trick. Now, I'm not underestimating the power of the pigs, but you are some REALLY paranoid people. Is your volume encrypted to begin with? That probably won't stop the pigs, but if you wiped the thing out too, it would probably make the thing unreadable by the best. As long as you did a good enough job to scramble the fuck out of the polarity, and did so in a way without a certain pattern, I think it would pretty much be FUBAR'd. Maybe stick an M80 into the thing to finish the job off for fuck's sake. Or you could take a cordless drill to put a nice hole through all those platters. How hard would it be to melt the platters? Remember, "Anything worth doing, is worth doing right."
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monoamine
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Re: Electromagnetic Hard Drive Formatting. [Re: biglo]
#1695667 - 07/08/03 05:47 AM (20 years, 9 months ago) |
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It fuckin' amazes me the kind of shit they can do to recover data from a hard drive....
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mntlfngrs
The Art of Casterbation
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Re: Electromagnetic Hard Drive Formatting. [Re: monoamine]
#1701724 - 07/10/03 02:59 AM (20 years, 9 months ago) |
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get an external drive and place it in a 10 ton hydrolic press. flick the switch and crush it to dust.
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Be all and you'll be to end all
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monoamine
umask 077(nonefor you)
Registered: 09/06/02
Posts: 3,095
Loc: Jacksonville,FL
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Re: Electromagnetic Hard Drive Formatting. [Re: mntlfngrs]
#1704449 - 07/10/03 11:17 PM (20 years, 9 months ago) |
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That's an excellent idea,but I don't have access to a 10 ton hydrolic press.
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People think that if you just say the word "hallucinations" it explains everything you want it to explain and eventually whatever it is you can't explain will just go away.It's just a word,it doesn't explain anything...
Douglas Adams
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gir
Perceptionist
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Re: Electromagnetic Hard Drive Formatting. [Re: monoamine]
#1754804 - 07/28/03 02:48 AM (20 years, 8 months ago) |
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Hey Effed, been a while eh? I just downloaded a great little program for deep cleaning hard drives. Suposedly after you clean your drive with this, theres no getting your stuff back ever again. I used it 2 days ago actually and its wonderful! I even tried a couple of things to see if there was a trace of anything left. nope! all gone! The recovery programs I have I have gotten things from formatted and or re-partitioned hard drives with. The hard drive cleaner thingy is here http://download.com.com/3000-2092-10188745.html?tag=lst-0-1
I wasnt trying to get rid of evidence or anything, i was just out of ideas to try and restore one of my drives that was plagued with bad sectors and such. It seemed to help with all of that too.
good luck
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wingnutx
Registered: 09/24/00
Posts: 2,287
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Re: Electromagnetic Hard Drive Erasing? [Re: Effed]
#1755738 - 07/28/03 10:26 AM (20 years, 8 months ago) |
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2 ways to make your data unrecoverable:
physically destroy the drive, like crush it to pieces. Don't try fire, since that may not destroy the platters.
get a program like 'wipe disk' that will write ones and zeros over the entire disk. this is time consuming, obviously.
You could build a really strong degaussing coil, but no guarantees.
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