Make a harddrive completely unbootable?

Talrinys · 9 Jan 2009 at 23:55

Hey OcUK

Does anyone know of a way to corrupt a harddrive in a way that it is completely incapable of booting, and preferrably ever booting again?
I need to send in my old laptop for a refund, it's on the verge on a 3rd complete breakdown, but i need to deliver it on monday, and the harddrive should preferably not have a single percent chance of actually showing one of it's brighter moments when i'm in the store for the refund.

The 2 times that it has crashed before it has failed to be recognized by the BIOS most of the time, and if it did recognize it, it never got to Windows, and using a LiveCD showed corrupted files all over.

visibleman · 10 Jan 2009 at 01:01

Editing and corrupting the MBR (MBRWizard etc) would make the drive not bootable, although it wouldn't stop it being recognised by the BIOS - for that i would assume you'd need to physically damage the drive.

Talrinys · 10 Jan 2009 at 09:03

visibleman said:
Editing and corrupting the MBR (MBRWizard etc) would make the drive not bootable, although it wouldn't stop it being recognised by the BIOS - for that i would assume you'd need to physically damage the drive.

There is no way to flash the drive firmware so that it's completely ruined, without opening it physically?

Fubsy · 10 Jan 2009 at 09:24

Magnets?

AtaRo · 10 Jan 2009 at 10:21

If you got access to one of these.it will erase your drive and even damage the hard drive board making it completely useless.

V91HD/DLT - HIGH ENERGY DEGAUSSER

Vegetarian · 10 Jan 2009 at 10:47

Plug the power cable upside down (you have to jiggle it about to get it in) it will burn out the drive withing seconds! I hold no reponsibility of people blowing themselfs up etc.

Talrinys · 11 Jan 2009 at 15:24

Well that's the point, i can't do anything hardware wise, if that was the case it would be easy to mess it up but i can't open the laptop, they use annoying screws and it would break warranty, i think flashing the BIOS might be best?

eXor · 11 Jan 2009 at 15:43

If you have a Linux LiveCD, you can check what the name of the disk is with the following command: e.g. /dev/sda /dev/hda

Code:

fdisk -l

then ( assuming the first disk is called sda1 )

Code:

dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda1 bs=512 count=1

Takes seconds and it will never boot. I'd unplug other drives, if you don't know what you're doing.

bru · 11 Jan 2009 at 15:53

flash the laptop bios and pull the plug half way through....one corrupt bios and one non booting laptop