Is a hammer the best they can come up with?

[zara_backdog]

Or send it anywhere via CityLink

[BrowneIssue]

The best ways to render a hardrive permanently unreadable, beating seven bells out of it with a lump hammer works but there must be a more entertaining way of doing it.

A college lecturer told us of a colleague who had jumped off a desk onto an RL02 disk pack to shatter the platters. He broke one ankle and sprained the other; the platters remained intact. So don't do that.

At a previous secure site, we replaced a small mainframe that had had interesting stuff on it and the hard drives from that were melted down with scrap metal. Not only unreadable, but you would not even be able to determine they had been hard drives from the mix of elements! You might be satisfied by using a bonfire.

Fancy making a nice big Tesla coil? You should be able to wreck the conductive platters with some pretty sparks.

Bung it in a microwave? It'll be pretty. Use either a works microwave (like I did with cutlery, a digital watch, a roll of Sellotape, some pencils...) or go round someone else's place to do it.

Know anyone with access to automatic weapons?

I have stripped a few down to their individual component parts for bits to use on sci-fi wargaming scenery. That does leave the platters intact so someone could put them in a new housing and get the data back so not really a proper solution.

Use electrolysis to plate it with silver and use it as an ornament.

Use electrolysis to strip the platters of their metallic magnetic coating.

Bung it in acid to strip the platters of their coating.

Use someone's engagement ring to scratch the surface of all the platters.

Put it in the glovebox of a car and leave the car at the side of a road in London without a tax disk. The pigs will tow it and crush it. The act of lifting the car into the crusher with that big electromagnet on the roof will not do the recording on the disk any good at all.

Sneak it into the Large Hadron Collider and let one of their flip-off supermagnets tweak the magnetic recording on the surface.

Drop it off the side of a ship when over that deep trench in the Atlantic. If you are lucky it will fall down one of the vents and be super-heated which might warp the platters a little bit, thereby making them unreadable.

Give the platters to a baby to use as a teething ring.

Take it to Iceland / Hawaii and throw it into lava.

Have it enter the earth's atmosphere from satellite-type altitude. It will burn up on re-entry. (Getting it up there I leave as an exercise for the reader.)

Wait for the sun to go super-nova.

Wrap it in Happy Birthday wrapping paper and post it to yourself. Or send it anywhere via CityLink. Same outcome.


HTH

PS was a link missing from the original post?

[zara_backdog]

Ask the desktop support team to intall a new app on it.

Usually works here.

[Pondlife]

Ask the desktop support team to intall a new app on it.

Usually works here.

[DaveB]

Apart from stating the blindingly obvious - Just deleting files doesnt actually get rid of them - the article is also a little light on suggestions as to how you might go about destroying the disks in question.

On the plus side at least it's on the front page of the BBC which means at least a few people will take notice and actually think about it when they come to replace their PC's.

So, suggestions from the congregation. The best ways to render a hardrive permanently unreadable, beating seven bells out of it with a lump hammer works but there must be a more entertaining way of doing it.