Laptop vs Thermite: Slow motion destruction

thermitethumb

Years ago we covered using thermite to destroy a hard drive. The idea is that if you melt through the platters, the data is completely unrecoverable.  There are tons of videos of people doing this, but they all have a similar format. There’s a hard drive, with a flower pot or soda can sitting on top full of thermite. … Read the rest

Thanksgiving with thermite

For those in the states, Happy Thanksgiving. Whether or not you celebrate the traditional holiday, you might still want to take a moment to think of what you are thankful for. We are thankful for our readers, who drive us to keep posting projects and challenge us to improve our skills. The Hackers, who supply us projects to write about, … Read the rest

Hard drive destruction plan

[Wolf] emailed us to show us his Self destructing Hard Drive tutorial. He’s using thermite, like we did, but he’s put a little more effort into the delivery system. In the video, you can see a huge spray molten iron. This is because his “jet”, the block of wood hollowed out to focus the thermite on to the hard … Read the rest

Fix 0LBA and BSY HDD errors

One of the worst moments almost every hacker has experienced is a hard drive inexplicably dieing. And of course, its at the most inopportune time and you’ve had no chance to backup!

Recently there has been an influx of Seagate hard drives (specifically the 2700.11s) kicking the bucket with firmware errors 0LBA and BSY. The good news is [Gradius2] … Read the rest

Exploding processors for real

After we posted the “High explosives pc case” earlier we saw a resounding outcry in the comments for combustible destruction. Oddly enough, we got a submission of something along just those lines. [tazzik] has taken the heat sink off of his athlon 1400+ and covered the poor processor in potassium chlorate. As you can see in the … Read the rest

How-to: Thermite hard drive destruction

After the overwhelming response to the Hackit we posted about automated hard drive destruction last fall, we finally decided to test out some thermite hard drive destruction ourselves. This has been done on The Screen Savers but they did not show up close results of the platters. So, aluminum and black iron oxide were procured through eBay, and until it … Read the rest

Hack a Day 2: Electric Boogaloo

Well, that was fun… no, not really, but we’re back from the dead like Steve Jobs. We’ve been getting DDoS’d since essentially the first day we originally came back. After killing a 1G connection, we decided to find a different solution. Since the world didn’t end this week, we brought the site back using WordPress.com as the new … Read the rest