On Dec 19, 2005, at 8:36 AM, Michael H. Georg wrote: > The hole makes it impossible for the off-the-street person to spin > up the drive by simply plugging in an IDE cable and power source. > Balance and air pressure is critical as the heads are literally > nanometers from the disks. It will physically crash. > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk
Sure. I just thought it ironic that the company had deliberately put a hole in the drive so that there would be this huge barrier of time and expense for anyone trying to access the data on what is probably a dead drive. Yet, the only ones that had to spend time and money to actually cross that barrier was the company itself. Most likely for the off-the-street person, booting with Knoppix and running 'cat /dev/zero > /dev/hda' would have been enough of a barrier. You'd only have to let the command run for a second or so. Of course, the advantage of the hole is that it is immediately apparent that the drive just wont work. And it only costs the price of a drill bit and a drill, which is probably cheaper than training people how to use Knoppix. Regards, - Robert http://www.cwelug.org/downloads Help others get OpenSource software. Distribute FLOSS for Windows, Linux, *BSD, and MacOS X with BitTorrent _______________________________________________ CWE-LUG mailing list [email protected] http://www.cwelug.org/ http://www.cwelug.org/archives/ http://www.cwelug.org/mailinglist/
