Can a Virus Really Destroy Your Hard Drive? - Comments Page 1

While it is possible for a virus to destroy hardware there is little motive to do so. Most everything these days wants to go undetected and gain some benefit from your computer having the virus not simply destroy it. But for real life examples our national hackers did attempt to do this very thing to Iranian computers trying to make nuclear weapons; although not a hard drive, but other physical components.

Back in the days of floppies they did try to destroy floppy drives by subjecting drive to stressful repeated commands. However the end product was a "virus" that made your Apple ][ drive sound like it was having sex. Around the same time there was a somewhat useful boot utility/virus that would only allow a floppy to boot 0-255 times before destroying itself.

I did have a friend do one of the stupidest things I've ever seen back in the 486 days. I set a computer up for him and had to set the bios. It had a 120meg drive. He quickly ran out of space and knowing just enough went back into bios and configured it as 200meg drive. Several years later for fun I was able to get it working with a low level format although I tossed it once it tested fine.

i love this article bob. there are many unscrupulous techs who play on their clients misery and make a living off it. i hope all and sundry who have read this article will heed your advice.

Another great article Bob! I wish I had your work ethic (to turn these articles out so regularly), your organized mind and clarity of thought.

Thanks for all you do :)

Excellent article, Bob. I purchased my first computer in 1986 & have owned a goodly number of them over the years. We have never had a hard drive crash on us. Other things have given out...keyboards....power jacks and even cables between laptops and their screens. But never an HDD. Hope everyone could read your info. before agreeing to purchase of a new one from the repair "expert".

Bob this is why I read your articles and will continue to...have a good weekend!!!

Bob, finally someone has told the truth, about viruses and the "total destruction of a hard drive."

While, I have only been dealing with computers, since Sept. 1996 ... I have had my share of infected hard drives!!! Both personal and with family and friends. Never, have I had a hard drive be totally "ruined", by a Virus or Trojan Horse or Worm or Spyware or Malware.

Yes, I have seen and had hard drives "crash", in my PCs, but, that is due to platter failure or the PC and hard drive got too hot or something else, which is usually, internal. Oh, I have some hard drives that were manufactured in 1999, that still function fine. Then, I have had some hard drives not even last 4 months. None of these "problems" had to do with any 'infections'.

Does a Virus or Trojan Horse or Worm or Spyware or Malware do havoc on any PC, that I have encountered ... Yes!!! However, the hard drive has been just fine.

Today there are some wonderful tools, that can "bring back" a PC, to a working order. First of all, the wonderful aspect that Microsoft, brought to their OS, back with Windows XP ... The Restore feature!

Lately, I have personally encountered the "program" Luck Leap. Don't have a clue, how it installs itself, on your PC and got it downloading some programs, that only use CNET's download. Yes, I am just as surprised. CNET has always been a 'trusted website' for downloading. The Restore worked, on getting rid of this extremely invasive program. I know, that it is still installed on my PC, but, it can't do any harm, right now.

The Restore feature, has saved my PC and others, many times. You download, what you think is a "safe" program and suddenly, your PC goes haywire or won't run, right or keeps shutting down. Been there ... Done that ... Even bought the T-Shirt!!!

Even the best geek, makes mistakes and Restore helps them, in a pinch. If, Restore doesn't do the job, I have kept Restoring back, until I found a "safe" operating system, for my PC. :)

A number of years ago an ex-friend told me his HDD needed replacement and I said I'd do it for him as a favor. Since he decided we no longer wanted to be friends he took it to the Geej squad and they convinced him to replace it with an external drive! After charging him $60 for initial checkout I wonder how much more he spent? After that My view of the Geej squad is the same as the professional drivers stickers I see on vehicles.

Hey IanG I second your comment regarding Bob's seemingly unfathomable energy and clarity of thought to turn out these articles.

Heaven knows where we would all be if back in the day he had turned his intellectual skills and capacity to theoretical physics or medical science

I have worked on a lot of computers and never found a virus that has physically damaged a hard drive.

However, in the early days, before IDE drives, it may have been possible, as it was required to park a head before powering down a computer. If addition, I was told, it was possible to make a head seek so rapidly that it could damage the arm where the read/write head was mounted. I never have seen that, but it may have been possible at the time.

Some years ago there were reports of IBM CRT displays catching fire when exercised with a particular sequence of display commands. (Sorry. I cannot find a citation. It's been a while.) I suppose that could happen if the beam was swung from one extreme to the other, i.e. with maximum swings in deflection-coil current. The coils could get warm, but more likely the driving transistors could overheat if they had insufficient current-carrying capacity.

Software can be thoroughly irrational. Some years ago, again, when I tried to install Suse Linux, it corrupted my hard disk so badly I had to re-format.

And hardware can be thoroughly irrational. When my external hard disk failed, I re-formatted, and restored from a backup, only to find I'd been backing up numerous corrupted files. Sixteen null bytes appeared at the beginnings, and sometimes at the ends, of files at random locations. Perhaps careful study would show a pattern, but who has the time?

The answer isn't so simple. Modern hard drives have a special zone for writing service information. In case of damage of this zone the hard drive would be completely killed. Some programs like MHDD as I know are capable to work with this info, but the real professional is able to recover this part from scratch. It's not so easy to reach this service info, but theoretically it's possible. This type of damage is equivalent to hardware problem, since there is no info about physical parameters of a drive. As I know, the full access to that zone is possible through special set of contacts or through special equipment, but since MHDD-like programs can work with that too, it's possible for a virus to destroy this info as well. But, of course, there is no universal way to access service zone of any hard drive, so this type of a virus would damage only particular type of hard drives and, possible, even particular version of firmware of such drives. So it's, I think, theoretically possible, but very unlikely due to high complexity and very limited possible damage. I am not a professional in this area, but after some research and experience with badly damaged drives, I came to those conclusions. It happened pretty long ago, so I am not sure if it is not fixed already. But as I am a skeptic, I think, the possibility still can be here.

Bob,
Thank you for a really brilliant article , so Interesting and very, very, informative to us amateur users .i am very grateful to you for your articles and always wonder how you can think of different subjects as often as you Do.
Thanks again burt

If a program were to overwrite the flash memory of a device such as a drive, camera, etc. it might also manage to overwrite the "loader" program which allows the device to process updating the flash memory in the first place.

This is "just data" but without the update program in the flash memory, it would be imposible to re-install the device's internal firmtware without unsoldering the flash memory and reprograming it with an external programer. In other words- the manuacturer would likly just throw away the circuit board and start afresh.

Hello Mr. Rankin:

To go along with Mr. Burt's comment . . . If I did not know any better I'd think you have a team helping you to produce these fine timely articles but Alas! I know you are a one-man army when it comes to the research and writing.

Mr. Rankin, I do not know how you do it all and you most likely have a full-time job to boot!

Cheers,

TheRube

My hard drive rotates. So do centrifuges. See Stuxnet

my previous computer was a 20" iMac. One day it ceased working (all the noises and grinds should have been a clue) so I took it into the local MAC store who (obviously) said I needed a new hard drive, which I bought. But in a fit of optimism, I requested to keep the old one.

I was at the local pro camera store (they have a MAC dept.) and complained to them about my iMac problem. He said to bring the HD in and he'd take a look at it.

I did and he did. He said on that model of HD there is a thin layer of foam in it and it helps retain heat and it subsequently burnt a spot in the circuit board. All the MAC store had to do was transfer the info from the old HD itself to the new HD, since the HD itself was fine. I figured that since the MAC store also does a lot of repairs, they would have a similar HD around. (as I'm typing this, it does not sound logical, so you may have to extrapolate the facts behind it) and they could swap HDs, transfer the data to my new HD and return the borrowed HD to the original one they had in stock.

I realize that this is somewhat difficult to follow, but the upshot is that ALL my original data was now on the new HD I had bought (it was a larger HD) and I did not need to buy a new one...except it was a sale for the MAC store and saved them the trouble of actually examining the old HD.

I hope you can at least follow the basic precepts that I've outlined.

I hope that you and your readers can get from this that because a HD seems to be dead, the info is still there (maybe) but a repair place has to do a little digging and testing and examine the thing completely.

Bob, thanks for all your great comments and info.
Neil Koven

@TheRube, as hard as it is to believe, now (FINALLY! WHEW!) it's DOCTOR RANKIN -- yes, despite the insatiably of squirrels looking for enough power to levitate their interstellar vehicles (having seen their life-form fail on this planet) he FINALLY got his Ph.D. (it took him long enough though) so now the proper form of address is 'Doctor' though I doubt you'd hear Bob himself say this.

Don't forget that "Ph.D." stands for "Doctor of Philosophy"*, so he is, in essence, a Doctor who corrects the way your moral and ethical views of the Universe are wrong**,and fixes them.

* "Philos" means, in essence, the love of being right. Specifically from _Online Etymological Dictionary "[. . .] directly from Latin philosophia and from Greek philosophia "love of knowledge, pursuit of wisdom [. . . ]" it's clear that he is filled with the love of being right - like all of us. Only he had to spend a lot of money and jump through a LOT of hoops to prove that he can love the same things as passionately as the people who decide if he really does. THEY decided if he is in love with the right knowledge or not. Apparently he agrees enough with the committee and fooled them long enough (part of the 'test') that they gave him the right to think his own thoughts and have them be correct, too.

** 'wrong' simply means doesn't agree with what he KNOWS to be 'true' or is "in essence, True".
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Thus I prefer Doc, Doc Bob, or mostly plain old 'Bob'. He's earned it in my book. MORE than earned it. Heck I was rooting (no pun intended) when he was a slave in the south toiling away while the nefarious squirrels were trying to jump-start their craft using a main power supply on campus. They failed as I still see them running around what looks to us measly humans as a calm and tranquil campus completely unaware that we ARE in the path of the Vogons and were we aware WE'D be scampering under cars and up trees trying to escape too, right Doctor Bob?

Bob, I not only enjoy your articles but also the thoughtful posts by your readers. So often, reader's posts deteriorate into rants, but this site is far more disciplined. Excellent!

I am a pro pc tech. I personally have encountered several notebooks infected with a virus that attacks the optical drive, apparently blocking a forced power down by pressing power button while causing the tracking arm to endlessly snap back and forth, making quite a racket, until the optical drive dies. Only way to stop it was pull the power cord and battery.
These have all been in Western Europe 2008-2010.

While physical destruction may not be the case, and there are undoubtedly unscrupulous techs whose primary goal is to sell equipment, if a hard drive is rendered unusable by a virus, then to the lay person the disk was destroyed by the virus. I tell my students that it's hard to physically break their computer (unless they drop it), but all too easy to catch something that will make it so someone else will have to fix it for them.