Can a Virus Really Destroy Your Hard Drive? - Comments Page 2

In theory, is it possible for a virus or some other detective computer coding to cause a power surge? In other words, is the power supply controlled by feedback from the computer? If so, are there power supplies that have safety feature to prevent this or do you just have to be very careful to select a power supply that meets your computer needs without exceeding it too much?

EDITOR'S NOTE: I think you worry too much. :-)

I have heard of viruses being able to "corrupt" ram sticks, making them useless, although i don't know how it can cause physical damage to a ram stick...

great article as well as all articles and thanks for the confirmation. I was researching this, I found your article very quickly, read it and now know the exact truth! I like that!
thanks, again!

I agree with your statement given the strict interpretation you impose of the word 'destroy' but as a tech - I have told clients that their hard drive was 'destroyed' by a virus - because it was beyond economic recovery.

If the data is seriously hammered, attempting to restore the data on the drive might require Kroll Labs services or similar and they are not cheap.

If the client has been following recommendations and backing up to an external hard drive on a reasonably regular basis then it's not likely that a trip to Kroll will be considered cost effective by the client. They usually go into sticker shock at that point.

I have seen a drive with a virus be unable to be repartitioned and reformatted - for a reinstall.

Could be hardware failure - could have been that the firmware was overwritten/corrupted - but who cares? At some point it's cheaper to install a new (frequently better/larger) hard drive than to purchase more of my time, even at my relatively friendly $45 an hour labor rate, attempting heroic measures to recover a 2+ year old hard drive worth maybe $35 doesn't make sense.

If I can't 'mostly' have it fixed in an hour - time to perform triage here - replace the drive, restore from back up, run AV on that, clean if need be - and be done with it.

Effort at fixing old drive would include booting to CD and doing a scan and clean, repairing boot sector (or attempting to), running a hard drive utility software or two to fix the fat if indicated. If that doesn't result in a bootable drive that seems stable enough to do a restore from backup, then as far as I am concerned, that drive has been destroyed; it is beyond economic recovery.

For $100 these days, you can get a fairly awesome new hard drive. Add no more than 2 to 3 hours labor and you can be good to go. Or you can spend 4 hours or more on labor and THEN realize what beyond economic recovery means, when you hear your tech say, I don't know how much longer this is going to take - there is something not right about the way the drive is acting.

I can take it back to my shop and see if I can do a firmware update/overwrite - but we are looking at over $300 in service labor before it will be up and running and it's possible you will still need to replace the drive.

Not doing a client any favor by having him potentially be on the hook for $400 or more when he could have had an improved/upgraded computer performance and be back up and running for $225 out the door.

Of course - if there is no backup and the contents of the drive include irreplaceable data - Houston we have a problem. That's what has kept Kroll in business all these years.

I think Bob made a good article on this subject. And with what I know about the internal operation of computers, I would not in any way disagree with him.
But, I have to say, that Gordon L. made some very good points as well. However, I think he should explain to a customer, just like he did to us. Most people would understand it is beyond repair, just like a highly damaged transmission in a car. It may very well be economically prohibitive to repair. Don't lie to them, Gordon, just tell them the truth, like you explained to us.

I have been hacked almost three years. I am senior and started computer design. I spent all day every month and year because of this hacker hidden hidrance. I could not report police because no physical or certain proof. It seems there is no law to control this coward dirty behavior. This hacker only tarket usb connections. I have more than 10 flash sticks broken and useless. I have four harddisks unable to read and write in sector. They all new in new labtop. One of them is Toshibar. The hacker stays all day home or somewhere see what I am doing. Most of virus are Trash-500, 999, 1000. Thre is no solution using anti virus program such as norton, avg etc due to the hacker plant in dll in the meantime of installation or downloads.
Nowadays, repair shops are prosperous owing to innocent victims. Dont think virus or program not to damage whole. The virus is a program as much as one giga or two giga conntaining all system itself. Please advice me your opinion.

The problem with the article above is that it does not tell readers that some viruses are written to change drive data that is read by the operating system. Some viruses have become very adept at hiding themselves, making copies of them selves etc, and one trick they use is to change the drive's parameters in order to fool the operating system. Many stealth viruses exist which do this. There are also malicious viruslike programs that will corrupt a drive by attempting to change sduch parameters and hide viruses. Hard drives cannot physically be destroyed by viruses but sometimes they do damage the drive geometry data and other parameters to such an extent the drive may as well be physically damaged, until it is completely reformatted, and possibly given a low level format

Then how would using DC++ back in Window$ ME days kill 2 hard drives beyond any later usage, and none were killed after quitting ? I certainly don't believe this article is right from long and varying experience.

Well hard drive failure and viruses can be linked in one way, and that is user neglect and error.
Plus honestly its still good to get more then one hard drive for d4esktops and external drives for non desktops, backups should be encouraged often.

http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/57868/can-malware-physically-damage-a-hard-drive

Also overheating and overvolting which can be done now through the software can result in a hardware failure.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Lots of speculation and unsubstantiated claims there, most of which were dismissed by other commenters. I'll believe it when I see the code, and can use it to nuke one of my old drives. :-)

I installed a game from pirate bay and within a day my hard drive went from 500gb to 0.0gb. Was it a virus or bad luck?

EDITOR'S NOTE: Both.

Could a virus continually write to a single sector and wear it out? Could a virus "pick on" a number of "important" sectors and render a drive FUBAR?

EDITOR'S NOTE: I addressed that point in the article.

Rightly said Gordon L. Please always explain that fact to your customers as said. Concerning Bob's article, I will say that it's still a virus which has render the hard drive unusable so it is a damage. It must be replaced to avoid extra costs and time.

thanks man, i kept telling my friends the same thing...... now im certain of this issue :)

I do not know how long this article has been out, but for a while software has been able to physically damage a hard drive. This is done by moving the "needle" in a way the hard drive gets broken.

Hey bro i had losted my hp laotop becouzz i put my lappy shutdown for some days when virus was attacked on my lappy....

In "BASIC" programming class in 1986 in Burlington County college, our instructor was in his 60's, had known Mauchly and Eckert personally and said that "two years ago two students from Germany had wondered if it was possible to actually get the read/write head to physically impact the hard disk in our main disk drives" These were the big things that weighed several pounds, was over 2 feet on a side and three feet high like in "Terminator 2". they wrote a code that caused the heads to impact the disk surface and the disk kept spinning. He said "It literally carved a groove in the surface of the disk, and caused us $5,000 to replace the hard drive".
I have always taken him at his word.
This sounds like "Cousin Vinny Syndrome" but I just with I could remember his name.