We have a WD 2TB green hard drive that has failed, it will not even be recognised when connected to the pc. It will have to go back under warranty, but is there any way of wiping the data from it first ? IE degaussing wand, large magnet etc ?
erasing faulty hard drive
Nov 22, 2011
15 Replies
I guess 4 or 5 turns of heavy cable wrapped around it and then connect to a welder should corrupt a few areas :-)
Rheilly P
**None of that is likely to do all that much. HDs are pretty well shielded and quite a bit of energy is required to alter the magnetic domains from a large distance (2cm).
I know this from some experiments I did some time ago. Out of curiousity.
-- Trevor Wilson
formatting link
"kreed"
** Doing any such thing will likely void the warranty.Brute force, bulk erasure usually renders a hard drive unusable cos it remove files put there by the manufacturer.
OTOH - I suspect you have a $129 external drive as sold by Officeworks and others - so the chances are no-body will even look at it to see if it is really faulty.
... Phil
and
is
It was a bare drive we bought, but I have bought officeworks ones, and some of them are identical. Some of the Officeworks ones have a caviar black drive in them actually.
You are probably right, no one is likely to bother scanning through
2tb of data, especially when they must get hundreds of them through their service centre every week.
Have you determined that you won't actually invalidate your warranty claim by that action?
No idea if it will work but about 20 seconds in the microwave might do the job. Just keep an eye open for any arching or melting as I imagine this would not be a good look when returning the HD.
I would not want to give my data to anyone.
:-P
"kreed" "Phil Allison"
It was a bare drive we bought, but I have bought officeworks ones, and some of them are identical. Some of the Officeworks ones have a caviar black drive in them actually.
You are probably right, no one is likely to bother scanning through
2tb of data, especially when they must get hundreds of them through their service centre every week.** HDs are non repairable and at $129 retail it becomes uneconomic to send to a tech test out.
The transport and handling costs alone would do that.
... Phil
**That, of course, would not only be insane, but ineffective.
**The damage will likely occur inside the magnetron. **Fair enough. Don't use clound computing.
-- Trevor Wilson
formatting link
E
y.
ebeing metal, I doubt that any of the microwave radiation would make it to the platters.
Useless and invalidate any warranty claim (if any damage detectable)
what files?
Dick Smith $99
How much is privacy worth?
Seems as though it is working again, but only when laid upside down, and only when plugged directly to the SATA connector on a PC motherboard. Will not work in a USB case, but identical ones (WD20EARS) will. Strange
Am erasing data now while it keeps working before returning it. Fortunately was nowhere near full.
Check out sdelete utility (part of SysInternals suite), you probably want run it once you delete your files. Tom
Nothing that won't void the warranty. is secrecy worth the price of the drive?
?? 100% natural
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