The magnet removed the low-level formatting on the platter, that the drive's hardware needs to determine the characteristics of the drive, such as its actual RPM, velocity of the platter at the heads, and the spacing and location of the tracks. With those marks gone or damaged, the hard drive circuitry can't tell for sure if the platter is even turning, or how far the heads are from the platter's hub. What might be interesting is determining if you've erased _all_ of the factory formatting: The heads appear to linger at certain locations before sweeping the disk's surface: is that because there's still some data there for the heads to lock onto, or is it just a physical coincidence or hard-wired spot? Does applying more magnetic disruption change the heads' behaviour?
+Nevin Williams *That.* Only other thing I can think of, but would say it's already improbable: the strong magnetic field permanently magnetized something in the heads.
superdau That'd also be interesting to see: what all parts of a hard-drive are susceptible (to a significant degree) to magnetic fields. I know some parts are shielding, such as the mounts for the neodymium magnets that swing the heads: They're still attracted to a magnet, but they constrain the flux away from the platters. It might be interesting to see this property explored too.
+Nevin Williams It could also be that the head did crash into the platter and that destroyed the head. It could be a very slow crash (for example near the middle of the drive) or a very swift touch but it could be enough to destroy it, I think.
+Nevin Williams well he could take an hdd, open it and then hold a much smaller magnet close to it whilst spinnig, thus erasing only that particular area
+GiantPen23 +Nevin Williams or even carefully take one apart, then re assemble (to make sure you can) test, then if it is ok, disassemble again and only test one platter, use paper to protect it, and make sure it cant hit the magnet, after each test try the next plater, once all are tested you have a definite answer, i thought that the head position was determined by the force applied
The magnet erased the "SA" or "Service area". The SA is a track before the MBR that you cannot access without special expensive hardware or reverse engineering. The SA contain usually the drive geometry, a bad sector list, smart data, firmware extension, LBA translator (which include bad sector reallocation address)... Without the SA, the hard drive can't boot. The SA is usually at the very beginning or end of the disk, that's why the head in your dead drive stay most of his time in the centre. Also, like Nevin Williams mentionned, you probably have erased the servo (data at the beginning of each sectors) that help the drive know his LBA position and rotating speed.
@@Fellow_Traveller1985 If you want to also damage the drive, than go for it. But keep in mind that the corruption caused to the SA / Servo will prevent you to run the drive after, to confirm you properly actually wiped everything. If you want to perma wipe the drive and render it unusable, a other good solution you can do and actually visually inspect, would be to use that strong magnet, but then, you get flat screw driver, spin the disk then remove the oxide layer with the screw driver. You do all the surface until all the brown stuff is gone. Then you turn platter over and do it on the other side.
+the mre nerd It's like touching a snowflake. You're gonna destroy it. Now go watch videos of people scrapping HDD's and laugh sadistically, knowing it causes great pain to your fellow nerds.
4:10 so what's interesting about that parking mechanism is you'll find it on MANY older hard drives. Back in that era, hard drives were all standardized to have a region of tracks designated as "the landing zone", located around the center of the platters closest to the spindle. This is because for a very short period of time, the heads themselves are actually making contact with the platters. They float above the surface of the platters when they spin fast enough to generate enough lift, but until they spin up quickly enough the heads will be dragging along the surface. There are spacers on the heads to keep actual head-to-platter contact to levels of non-existent, but the spacers will still make contact with the platter surface. This "landing zone" is more or less a region on the platter that contains no data, and is the designated region where the heads will park and "take off" from when spinning up. On more modern and recent drives, they simply park in the parking lock away from the platters and only cross the platters when they are rotating sufficiently fast enough to generate enough lift for the heads.
Thanks for all the kind comments and suggestions on what might have gone wrong with the drive! In my video where I opened another magnetically killed HDD, I concluded that the data on the platters were simply wiped away by the magnet. I still have a feeling that is the case - but I can't conclude it with certainty. Especially after reading this from the pro's: www.supermagnete.de/eng/faq/What-is-the-safe-distance-that-I-need-to-keep-to-my-devices#hard-drive But the 6x2" magnet is ridicously strong - even at some distance. Much more than my second-largest neo-magnet and the sizes that Supermagnete sells. So I wouldn't be surprised if the 6x2" is able to wipe data from the platters at some distance (~10 cm from the laptop in my case). It's just hard to prove :) I may need to revisit this magnet vs. HDD in the future...
+brainiac75 I think you bend the head's arms, that's why you can hear a tiny weird sound when the head is moving. Old HDD contains a lot of magnetic elements, even on the disk itself, nowadays engineer make them less sensitive to magnetic fields, but with a your powerfull magnet, I think you can still kill one. You clearly wipe everything on it (every single bit is a polarisation state so...) but this is not the major failure. I'm not a pro, so I don't tell you "THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS !!" and I'm French so forgive me my english skills aren't very good. Bonne continuation :)
+brainiac75 I took one of my old harddrives apart to find the read/write arm was bent on the top platter which was why it was making noises and likely why it was causing windows to crash. It wasn't even my boot drive and it was causing massive system instability. Your magnet may have not only wiped the data but also bent the read/write head even just slightly.
+SteelSkin667 I know right, I think the first time ive ever truely seen myself was in a corrupted notebook hard drive platter... Sat there for like 25 minutes...
Probably the reader heads are damaged. I once took apart a hard drive (mainly to see how a hard drive worked). I pretty much killed it from my stupidity. the drive was then used to create an xbox prank video. after that, I smashed the deceased drive with a hammer.
George Murray That's actually a good idea. A working HDD should be able to run without problems for a short time with the lid off. Maybe with some acrylic glass over to keep the worst dust particles out. Maybe it could visualize what effect the magnet has on the HDD.
With all due respect to the magnet, Seagate drives really don't need much encouragement to get to the "click of death." There's a reason data centre admins steer well clear of them.
8 лет назад+15
Did you try looking into disk manager? Windows only shows actual usable partitions in My Computer. But now that you've opened it it's destroyed, forever.
HDD stores not only user's data but also some additional information about it's sector and track layout, part of its firmware (in most cases) and some miscellanous data (SMART data, defect and relocation map, etc.). If this data is corrupted, then that disk is cactus. Very old HDDs could be low level formatted, so they could be fixed after such failure. But modern HDDs can't (In theory they can but no vendor gives you specialized software required to do this).
Probably manufacturer would be able to repair it as long as there is no physical damage to the platters and heads. They have to somehow create sectors on new blank platters. I don't know if that strong magnetic field didn't affect magnetic properties of materials used but if not, then it should be possible for them to fix it.
I think that the magnet somehow managed to misalign the reading heads (the clearance is really small, usually in the nano-scale). Perhaps that it is possible that the magnet affected some magnetic particles in the reading heads.
If you have seen a hard drive in shape under a strong microscope, you can see lots of little dots. When it is affected by a magnet, then you can see (under a microscope) a few wiped lines. The structure of the platters are away and the bootsector too
I'm a little late, but I can tell you that the "clicking" sound is the R/W head going back to the parked position to attempt to fix a problem. This can be caused mostly by 2 factors. The first factor is physical damage to the platter or head that stop it from reading the disk. The second factor is the destruction of the servo-information and partition map on the disk. They are usually inaccessible by software and they tell the disk controller where the head is located on the platters and where files are located. When you placed the magnet on the hard disk, you probably erased the whole drive including the servo-information. When you spin the drive up, the head doesn't know where it's at, and attempts to fix it by reseting the head position.
Nevin Williams is correct, the lower platter is pre -formatted with addressing and vital information necessary for the heads to know where they are at and fine tuning for reading and writing. Once erased all the ques necessary for the transfer of information and first transmission and hand shaking is lost. Heads do retries and verification and that is about it.
The magnetic feild caused the disk to get wiped since there is also a magnetic feild on the tip on the arm that aligns the magnetic particles on the disk creating 0" or 1". The monster magnet caused the aligned 0" and 1" on the disk to get moved around rendering them usless for the arm with needle to reed
The noise from the hard drive is because the heads have been bent by the magnet, and when passing to the disc, the heads are not aligning correctly. Also one of the heads may not be touching the disc and there for not reading all required bits. The hard drive may have not shown in in Explorer because it needed to be initialised.
Probably the service area got erased by the strong magnetic field. The strange head movement is due to the heads trying all the various backup service area locations on the HDD, and finding them all corrupted (a HDD always has multiple copies of the service area, in case a bad sector develops in one).
It could be tiny little floaters that hover very very close to the platter that are not the heads, but near the location of the heads that might've slipped, and flew away resulting the actual read/write heads to actually touch the platters (the read/write heads aren't actually supposed to touch the platters, it's only supposed to hover very close above them)
Basically what happened, is that the magnet set all of the poles on the platter to one polarity (north or south) erasing all data. There is a spot on the platter near the center of the platter that tells the head where it is, and that was erased. So, the head couldn't find where it was and read any data, effectively destroying it.
My guess would be that the basic magnetic structure of the platters has been damaged or destroyed. Mechanically it looks fine but magnetically it probably looks like a total mess. The computer is probably detecting it as a drive initially but when it comes to actually read the parameters of the drive it's getting rubbish so it doesn't show it in the drive listing. You might be able to plug it into a linux machine and get a bit more information about what's going wrong.
I've taken about 100 hard drives apart. I love the platters and the magnets. I found some really cool small tubular magnets and some small square ones that are really powerful for their size. This doesn't include the larger magnets that are inside.
Your massive magnet magnetized the core (the spinny thing), and the head reader is being attracted to it. You can see it getting stuck @ 2:18 cool video!
+RazorBeamz They are nice magnets but a little small in a fairly modern 2½" HDD. But I did it in a previous video with an old 3½" HDD: ruclips.net/video/ep_VCotA1ZY/видео.html Thanks for watching!
Every millimeter surface of the disk have negative and e positive attractions that are encoded like 101010 etc. When a powerful magnet gets to close to the shiny disk parts, the plates become demagnetized, rendering them useless to read or save info.
Maybe the magnetisation was weakened by the magnet, and was strong enough for a big jolt outwards, but only retracted back in by the disk spinning and pushing it back. Another theory is that (as a fact) the distance between the disk and needle is thinner than a human hair (hence why its game over as soon as you open it) but the magnet bent it enough so it touches, however that theory would make sounds as soon as it started, so to refine that theory, the airflow that the disk produces is enough to create a cushion around the needles, until it retracts back inwards, but pushes when going out. the reason why im saying inwards all the time is because if you listen and watch carefuly, the noise only happedns when the needle resets
So when an HDD is manufactured, they do what's called a low-level format in the factory. This turns the platters into sectors and whatnot for the data to be placed on the platters. This information is stored on the platters and coordinated with the controller. When you used the magnet, it wiped that low-level format, and thus the controller literally sees nothing on the drive [save random noise], and can never even do a format again [formatting from the OS would be a high-level format]. I'd also assume, given the size of your magnet, that ALL data on the disk was completely destroyed as well.
The carbon pads that make 'contact' with the platters are actually rather sensitive, so it is possible that the heads were offset. Another possibility is that the magnet corrupted the firmware, though that is unlikely as it is usually stored on solid state chips.
+SPEEDYxArcher My guess is that the magnet corrupted the boot sector of the drive - the firmware is fine, it's trying to scan properly, and the head stops where it needs to, but it just can't find the thing it's looking for.
Grzes kop I'm pretty sure that the "Error 2100: HDD0 (HardDisk Drive) initialization error" that we got in the last video is more serious than that. For a "No OS" error I imagine the computer needs to boot the hard drive, check for an OS, and then get back with a negative. If the boot sector is malformed, then it can't check for the OS because it simply doesn't know where to start looking.
Only partitioned drives will appear in Windows Explorer, it's possible the magnate erased the MBR or GPT partitioning data casing it to not appear in Windows Explorer. However if you check in Windows Disk Management or in the BIOS it might appear, another potential issue that the Vista system could have be installed on GPT format and when connected to the older XP simply doesn't appear because the BIOS is not forward compatible with GPT, the drive may have appeared had it been tested on a GPT enable UEFI based computer. If you have any questions about my rambling just ask
1st thing i would have tried would be to reformat. That is what a magnet messes up, the magnetically stored data. But if the tracks are completely gone I don't think a regular reformat will create new ones, it can only diddle the data in them.
Maybe the extreme magnetic field just threw the HDDs servo motors out of alignment? It might think it's moved the read head to the right position, but in reality it's off by a few millimeters.
The reading/writing head was bend up, so that it is too far away to read or write any Data to the disc. This distance is still to small to see anything.
When you put a magnet on the top of the hard drive the magnet wipes off all the sector and header marks making the disk completely useless and recognizable. Also Harddisk fails immediately when you open it up. No matter how gentle you were on the opening but tiny small particles and dust make the harddisk surface unreadable for the pointer.
hard drives and USB drives have "files" on them that allow basic formatting and detection on computers. your magnet removed those basic files needed for detection. hard drives use magnetic discs with ether a positive attraction and a negative attraction... a 1 or a 0. these attractions make up the basic binary, so that's why a magnet wipes the data, it disrupts all the set attractions to a 1 or a 0 depending on what side of the magnet is facing it.
Hard drive stores diagnostic and running information on it's platters. If that's wiped out by the magnet the hard drive won't be able to function correctly, if at all. Newer hard drives have those plastic "skids" to keep the heads from scratching the disk during transport.
The platters store information in the magnet field like a VHS tape, And once you place a magnet near enough to affect that magnetic field, The magnet will runin the magnetic field on the platters rendering the hard drive useless. After the magnet field on the platters is runied, You can not recover any data nor read/write to it. Remember, most of the important information about the hard drive is stored on the platter, Once that is runied the hard drive is dead.
If I were to take a guess I would say that the large neodymium magnet permanently changed the polarity of a ferromagnetic piece of the drive. As I don't know for sure, it would be cool to look for field lines in all of the pieces with some magnet viewing film.
The magnets demagnetized the magnets (or really screwed them up) that are used to control the read write heads and the magnet probably destroyed the low level on platter firmware. As a result the hard drive was completely rendered helpless. Data recycling companies often use these kind of magnets to completely destroy the low level formatted sector tracks and then the data so it will be gone forever. The magnet also probably warped the read write heads just enough short before a head crash but to prevent them from ever being able to read or write data anymore.
Maybe magnetized or misaligned the read/write heads causing the disk to be unable to locate tracks hence the repeated seek. Could have burned out heads as well.
I love your videos! It's really interesting seeing magnetism demonstrated on camera with so much stuff, from HDDs to chemical elements. Cheers from Mexico!
I think if you put the magnet near a floppy disk it will also erase data since floppy disks store data the same way like a HDD . Just that floppy disks are made of a different material.
I think the head is trying to find the low-level format information and because of the magnet, this has all gone. In the old days as part of maintenance an engineer could do a low-level format but it's just done at the factory these days and the only thing an installation engineer or a user can do is a high-level format.
Those USB sata things don't work as well as an actual motherboard ... maybe it would have still worked. Atleast you could have seen if the drive was recognised in the BIOS. And if it did ,you could have used a disk utility in Ubuntu to save it.
I feel like the pcb on the bottom side of the drive may have had a ram chip that was damaged (I've heard that at least some are controlled magnetically) because to my knowledge, no operation crucial data are stored on they platters. I believe it should be on rom chips and the computer should be able to detect it if the platters are blank.
The magnet destroyed a special area of the disk which is called the reserved area and not included in the formatted capacity. It tells the drive how much data each platter holds, contains bad block information and remapping data, smart test data, calibration data and the like. It also contains spare blocks to use so that bad blocks are remapped invisibly to the user. Since you destroyed this area, the drive is failing to initialize. Leave it on long enough and it will give up, spin down the platters and park the heads. Mental note to self: if I ever get one of those evil magnets, take it through the kitchen and across to the workbench in its box. Do not pass the row of LTO-4 backup tapes!
based on the erratic movement of the heads id say you offset the magnetic field that it uses to control read position, you could have magnetized something that was not meant to be or you could have de magnetized something that was meant to be, or you could have changed how strong those neodymium magnets are, either by increasing or decreasing their strength
***** ok, my question i guess is how do the needles index their position, is it through field strength variation in witch case a bad bearing could mean the inability to read, or is it like a magnetic version of optical coder wheels and strips? where changing the position (if each platter has it) of the platter would have no effect and changing platters could not work no matter how much you format it if they don't have the same code ring?, if so why don't cd drives do that with just limit switches and dc motors instead of still having one or 2 limit switches anyway but having a stepper motor
Try connecting it to your laptop and opening Disk Partitioning Program to see if it detects it. Run a cmd and start disk part program, check if it's working there, usually windows doesn't recognizes not working disks from the normal gui.
This kind of damage is reminiscent of what happens when a hard drive is dropped. The head may or may not crash, and if it does it's unlikely to cause scratches on the platter as the platter is a hard material. It's possible that the head might be damaged by a crash, the arm is almost certainly misaligned (as when a rotational drive is dropped) and there may be other signs of damage such as traces, magnetic components and components sensitive to static electricity since you were probably causing electromagnetic induction throughout the laptop... It might even be possible that other components within the laptop have been damaged, for example I'd love to see memtest86 results! Though that'll probably require a new fan as the system will get HOT... I also noticed that both screens were reacting strangely. Was this due to the GPU overheating when the fan was exposed (and probably stopped)?
My guess is that the hard drive deleted the data by switching the two poles North and South. The platters deleted data simply. So the head if is on the platter it can detect data but by just on or off of the platter thats why it can detect the data.
I'd like to see if it's how long you're holding the magnet to the disc drive, try taking a laptop without a ssd and just pass over it quickly and if it has no effect slow down on the next pass and see if it's the amount of time near the magnet breaking them
Last time I did the magnet to an HDD it bend the little prong on the heads so it didn't read the platters, but it also formatted the platters to nothing
Hmm I'm not sure if it's been mentioned but it is likely that the head(s) became magnetized - rendering them unable to resolve data. Demagnetisation with a degausser *may* remove any magnetism but the data is going to be shafted either way :)
It might be the identifier, Hard disk identifiers are sensitive to magnets, the identifier might be damaged and could not recognize the read files from the hard disk. (Off the bat I'm not really a computer genius, it's just my guess, reply if I got anything incorrect)
As a CompTIA Certified IT Technician, your Neodymium Magnets caused permanent erasure of the blocks in the platters themselves, and also made the Drive Head unreadable.
some HDDs use magnetic fields to determine if each bit is a 0 or a 1. using a giant magnet can secretly screw up the magnetization and the magnet itself. hope this helps.
A SSD, Solid State Drive, is used for short-term data storage. So is the Hard Disk Drive, Which writes Low, Magnetic fields on the platter. But, dust is sort of a problem. A 3 NanoMeter clearance between the platter and the Head means that debree and dust scratch the platter, screwing up the head. Click read more for SSD and other info. The Magnet may have not only "overlapped" the small magnetic field, BUT the read heads could have crashed into the platter. Now, with SSD. Solid State Drives are used for Short Term Data storage. The reason why is because SSD's use electrical currents to store data. These currents can "erode" overtime, so its best to keep it plugged in. These drives can not be hurt with a magnet.
If you had not opened it up you could probably find a method to run a low level format by connecting some diag port. The drive normally has preformatted sectors and couldn't find anything it expects anymore.
Not sure if it was answered or not: those heads are not supposed to "touch" the disk like that. that is why it isn't working. they are out of alignment. after you opened it in a non sterile environment as well it just ensured it was totally screwed :P
I'm not sure I understand how harddrive RPMs work...if the platters spin at 120 RPM, how does that equal 7200? Are there 60 layers to all the platters in total?
Hard drives uses electromagnetic to write data in its sectors using the binary code 1's and 0's. 1's are magnetized and 0's are demagnetized. By applying a magnet to it your hard drive you turned all the 0's in to 1's braking the binary code. This is why the hard drive can't be read.
I think I know what happened to the HDD. So, you know that HDDs store information "magnetically" so the platters are magnetic and so are the head readers so they can like transfer data using Earth's magnetic field. When you put the neodymium magnet near the HDD, the data might have gone straight into the magnet. I know it sounds ridiculous, but that is what I think.
Heya, loved your experiment. As for the examination, my guess would be the reading head's got magnetic and thus unable to read at all. But the data on that disk wouldn't be exactly readable either. Keep up the fun and informative videos, certainly makes my Sundays fun. regards warukata
I think like others said, the data and formatting have been destroyed / damaged. But I think you could have repaired the hard drive if you didn't open it, you could have completely wiped the whole disk with dban data destruction tool, then reformatted it. You said it was not detected by the computer but if you plugged it in the computer and booted into bios mode, then use dban to completely erase everything, then reformat it, that could work.
The reading arm without the head guide is just like "eww, no get it away" The disk might not be working as the magnet may have corrupted something like the partition table or something, making it hard to boot from, or be recognised at all
The magnet removed the low-level formatting on the platter, that the drive's hardware needs to determine the characteristics of the drive, such as its actual RPM, velocity of the platter at the heads, and the spacing and location of the tracks. With those marks gone or damaged, the hard drive circuitry can't tell for sure if the platter is even turning, or how far the heads are from the platter's hub.
What might be interesting is determining if you've erased _all_ of the factory formatting: The heads appear to linger at certain locations before sweeping the disk's surface: is that because there's still some data there for the heads to lock onto, or is it just a physical coincidence or hard-wired spot? Does applying more magnetic disruption change the heads' behaviour?
+Nevin Williams
*That.*
Only other thing I can think of, but would say it's already improbable: the strong magnetic field permanently magnetized something in the heads.
superdau That'd also be interesting to see: what all parts of a hard-drive are susceptible (to a significant degree) to magnetic fields.
I know some parts are shielding, such as the mounts for the neodymium magnets that swing the heads: They're still attracted to a magnet, but they constrain the flux away from the platters. It might be interesting to see this property explored too.
+Nevin Williams It could also be that the head did crash into the platter and that destroyed the head. It could be a very slow crash (for example near the middle of the drive) or a very swift touch but it could be enough to destroy it, I think.
+Nevin Williams well he could take an hdd, open it and then hold a much smaller magnet close to it whilst spinnig, thus erasing only that particular area
+GiantPen23 +Nevin Williams or even carefully take one apart, then re assemble (to make sure you can) test, then if it is ok, disassemble again and only test one platter, use paper to protect it, and make sure it cant hit the magnet, after each test try the next plater, once all are tested you have a definite answer, i thought that the head position was determined by the force applied
The magnet erased the "SA" or "Service area". The SA is a track before the MBR that you cannot access without special expensive hardware or reverse engineering.
The SA contain usually the drive geometry, a bad sector list, smart data, firmware extension, LBA translator (which include bad sector reallocation address)... Without the SA, the hard drive can't boot. The SA is usually at the very beginning or end of the disk, that's why the head in your dead drive stay most of his time in the centre.
Also, like Nevin Williams mentionned, you probably have erased the servo (data at the beginning of each sectors) that help the drive know his LBA position and rotating speed.
So a super strong magnet is not necessarily a sure way to perma-wipe a HDD?
@@Fellow_Traveller1985 If you want to also damage the drive, than go for it. But keep in mind that the corruption caused to the SA / Servo will prevent you to run the drive after, to confirm you properly actually wiped everything.
If you want to perma wipe the drive and render it unusable, a other good solution you can do and actually visually inspect, would be to use that strong magnet, but then, you get flat screw driver, spin the disk then remove the oxide layer with the screw driver. You do all the surface until all the brown stuff is gone. Then you turn platter over and do it on the other side.
It hurts to see you touching the platters
+Psycedelic Dakke dak How?
+the mre nerd oh lots of ways
+the mre nerd It's like touching a snowflake. You're gonna destroy it. Now go watch videos of people scrapping HDD's and laugh sadistically, knowing it causes great pain to your fellow nerds.
+Psycedelic Dakke dak They are broken anyways so who gives a shit.
jonnenne Anyways, i have a bad 640gb wd blue hdd that i opened up and fucked around with and it still works
its likely erased the servo tracking information
the drive could easily b erepaired if you have the million dollar equitment lol
That or something similar to that was my theory as well.
It's corrupted so it needed to be formatted then it woud work
@Creeper1105 no
4:10 so what's interesting about that parking mechanism is you'll find it on MANY older hard drives. Back in that era, hard drives were all standardized to have a region of tracks designated as "the landing zone", located around the center of the platters closest to the spindle. This is because for a very short period of time, the heads themselves are actually making contact with the platters. They float above the surface of the platters when they spin fast enough to generate enough lift, but until they spin up quickly enough the heads will be dragging along the surface. There are spacers on the heads to keep actual head-to-platter contact to levels of non-existent, but the spacers will still make contact with the platter surface.
This "landing zone" is more or less a region on the platter that contains no data, and is the designated region where the heads will park and "take off" from when spinning up.
On more modern and recent drives, they simply park in the parking lock away from the platters and only cross the platters when they are rotating sufficiently fast enough to generate enough lift for the heads.
Thanks for all the kind comments and suggestions on what might have gone wrong with the drive!
In my video where I opened another magnetically killed HDD, I concluded that the data on the platters were simply wiped away by the magnet.
I still have a feeling that is the case - but I can't conclude it with certainty.
Especially after reading this from the pro's: www.supermagnete.de/eng/faq/What-is-the-safe-distance-that-I-need-to-keep-to-my-devices#hard-drive
But the 6x2" magnet is ridicously strong - even at some distance. Much more than my second-largest neo-magnet and the sizes that Supermagnete sells. So I wouldn't be surprised if the 6x2" is able to wipe data from the platters at some distance (~10 cm from the laptop in my case). It's just hard to prove :) I may need to revisit this magnet vs. HDD in the future...
the magnet messed up the low level format so the reader/head don't even know where it is
+brainiac75 Please do, this awesome!
did you check if it showed up in disk or device manager.
+brainiac75 I think you bend the head's arms, that's why you can hear a tiny weird sound when the head is moving. Old HDD contains a lot of magnetic elements, even on the disk itself, nowadays engineer make them less sensitive to magnetic fields, but with a your powerfull magnet, I think you can still kill one.
You clearly wipe everything on it (every single bit is a polarisation state so...) but this is not the major failure.
I'm not a pro, so I don't tell you "THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS !!" and I'm French so forgive me my english skills aren't very good.
Bonne continuation :)
+brainiac75 I took one of my old harddrives apart to find the read/write arm was bent on the top platter which was why it was making noises and likely why it was causing windows to crash. It wasn't even my boot drive and it was causing massive system instability. Your magnet may have not only wiped the data but also bent the read/write head even just slightly.
HDD platters make nice mirrors!
+SteelSkin667 I know right, I think the first time ive ever truely seen myself was in a corrupted notebook hard drive platter... Sat there for like 25 minutes...
spelling bees must be tough where you're from lol.
isaac10231 Polish is even worse lol
What about hungarian?
What about filipino?
What about finnish?
B's
Probably the reader heads are damaged. I once took apart a hard drive (mainly to see how a hard drive worked). I pretty much killed it from my stupidity. the drive was then used to create an xbox prank video. after that, I smashed the deceased drive with a hammer.
Your videos are well made, informative and clearly you are passionate for the subject matter. Thank you for sharing this
+YOA Ownage HD
Thanks for watching and commenting. Nice to know I'm on the kind side of RUclips :)
+Brainiac75 magnet vs hard drive with the top off to see what it would really do
George Murray That's actually a good idea. A working HDD should be able to run without problems for a short time with the lid off. Maybe with some acrylic glass over to keep the worst dust particles out. Maybe it could visualize what effect the magnet has on the HDD.
do it plz
hmm youtube comments are broken again i cant see all replys
Tracking data on the platters is most likely damaged.
With all due respect to the magnet, Seagate drives really don't need much encouragement to get to the "click of death." There's a reason data centre admins steer well clear of them.
Did you try looking into disk manager? Windows only shows actual usable partitions in My Computer. But now that you've opened it it's destroyed, forever.
I'm pretty sure the drive was damaged beyond repair. The drive would just constantly click and spin the disk up and down - even before I opened it :)
HDD stores not only user's data but also some additional information about it's sector and track layout, part of its firmware (in most cases) and some miscellanous data (SMART data, defect and relocation map, etc.). If this data is corrupted, then that disk is cactus. Very old HDDs could be low level formatted, so they could be fixed after such failure. But modern HDDs can't (In theory they can but no vendor gives you specialized software required to do this).
ok so let me ask does this mean that an individual could make the software required to fix the drive or would the company have to do that?
Probably manufacturer would be able to repair it as long as there is no physical damage to the platters and heads. They have to somehow create sectors on new blank platters. I don't know if that strong magnetic field didn't affect magnetic properties of materials used but if not, then it should be possible for them to fix it.
pvc It's cheaper to get a new HDD then repair a broken one
no. it would cost nothing to connect a specialized controller onto the drive and let it to rewrite the missing blank information
Gabe Merritt Only because the tools that would be required to do so are not commonplace, just like with screens.
I think that the magnet somehow managed to misalign the reading heads (the clearance is really small, usually in the nano-scale). Perhaps that it is possible that the magnet affected some magnetic particles in the reading heads.
If you have seen a hard drive in shape under a strong microscope, you can see lots of little dots. When it is affected by a magnet, then you can see (under a microscope) a few wiped lines. The structure of the platters are away and the bootsector too
You messed up the data on the hard drive, the heads don't know where to go.
I'm a little late, but I can tell you that the "clicking" sound is the R/W head going back to the parked position to attempt to fix a problem. This can be caused mostly by 2 factors.
The first factor is physical damage to the platter or head that stop it from reading the disk. The second factor is the destruction of the servo-information and partition map on the disk. They are usually inaccessible by software and they tell the disk controller where the head is located on the platters and where files are located. When you placed the magnet on the hard disk, you probably erased the whole drive including the servo-information. When you spin the drive up, the head doesn't know where it's at, and attempts to fix it by reseting the head position.
nerd
What strikes me most about Danish is the simplicity of the words.
Nevin Williams is correct, the lower platter is pre -formatted with addressing and vital information necessary for the heads to know where they are at and fine tuning for reading and writing. Once erased all the ques necessary for the transfer of information and first transmission and hand shaking is lost. Heads do retries and verification and that is about it.
The magnetic feild caused the disk to get wiped since there is also a magnetic feild on the tip on the arm that aligns the magnetic particles on the disk creating 0" or 1". The monster magnet caused the aligned 0" and 1" on the disk to get moved around rendering them usless for the arm with needle to reed
Love your voice , it makes it so easy to listen to and take in what you're saying.
Funny!! I learned Danish today and I learned something about HDDs! Subscribed for the long run, mate!
+Zurhairi Zohreen
Awesome! Glad to hear.
+brainiac75 say "fnugfri klud" 3 times in your next video :-P.
The noise from the hard drive is because the heads have been bent by the magnet, and when passing to the disc, the heads are not aligning correctly. Also one of the heads may not be touching the disc and there for not reading all required bits. The hard drive may have not shown in in Explorer because it needed to be initialised.
Probably the service area got erased by the strong magnetic field. The strange head movement is due to the heads trying all the various backup service area locations on the HDD, and finding them all corrupted (a HDD always has multiple copies of the service area, in case a bad sector develops in one).
This is pretty cool, I have a 3TB Seagate Barracuda that shit itself a while ago and I kinda want to dismantle it now
It made me laugh when you ran the drive without the head guides. You're such a boss.
It could be tiny little floaters that hover very very close to the platter that are not the heads, but near the location of the heads that might've slipped, and flew away resulting the actual read/write heads to actually touch the platters (the read/write heads aren't actually supposed to touch the platters, it's only supposed to hover very close above them)
Basically what happened, is that the magnet set all of the poles on the platter to one polarity (north or south) erasing all data. There is a spot on the platter near the center of the platter that tells the head where it is, and that was erased. So, the head couldn't find where it was and read any data, effectively destroying it.
it almost looks like the read heads were bent up
My guess would be that the basic magnetic structure of the platters has been damaged or destroyed. Mechanically it looks fine but magnetically it probably looks like a total mess. The computer is probably detecting it as a drive initially but when it comes to actually read the parameters of the drive it's getting rubbish so it doesn't show it in the drive listing. You might be able to plug it into a linux machine and get a bit more information about what's going wrong.
3:54 disk sounds like a heart monitor machine or what ever you call the beeping heart noise
I've taken about 100 hard drives apart. I love the platters and the magnets. I found some really cool small tubular magnets and some small square ones that are really powerful for their size. This doesn't include the larger magnets that are inside.
the sound of the head scraping against the platters made me cringe
It is a horrible sound... I turned the volume way down in editing to avoid maddening people. In real life the sound was unbearable.
Your massive magnet magnetized the core (the spinny thing), and the head reader is being attracted to it. You can see it getting stuck @ 2:18 cool video!
0:46 Repeating that Danish word wasn't very hard for me as I come from Germany and moved to Sweden.
You should have taken the magnets out of the HDDs and demonstrated them!
+RazorBeamz
Yeah those are pretty strong as well, at least if they still are like in the old days... Those could bite you pretty bad!
+RazorBeamz
They are nice magnets but a little small in a fairly modern 2½" HDD. But I did it in a previous video with an old 3½" HDD: ruclips.net/video/ep_VCotA1ZY/видео.html
Thanks for watching!
I'm think that the part of data that makes the disk be visible was washed out
Every millimeter surface of the disk have negative and e
positive attractions that are encoded like 101010 etc. When a powerful magnet gets to close to the shiny disk parts, the plates become demagnetized, rendering them useless to read or save info.
This is really well researched and filmed, good job dude!
Maybe the magnetisation was weakened by the magnet, and was strong enough for a big jolt outwards, but only retracted back in by the disk spinning and pushing it back. Another theory is that (as a fact) the distance between the disk and needle is thinner than a human hair (hence why its game over as soon as you open it) but the magnet bent it enough so it touches, however that theory would make sounds as soon as it started, so to refine that theory, the airflow that the disk produces is enough to create a cushion around the needles, until it retracts back inwards, but pushes when going out.
the reason why im saying inwards all the time is because if you listen and watch carefuly, the noise only happedns when the needle resets
the hdd's controller also store some data on the platter itself if im not mistaken. if that data is wiped the controller will fail to bootstrap
So when an HDD is manufactured, they do what's called a low-level format in the factory. This turns the platters into sectors and whatnot for the data to be placed on the platters. This information is stored on the platters and coordinated with the controller. When you used the magnet, it wiped that low-level format, and thus the controller literally sees nothing on the drive [save random noise], and can never even do a format again [formatting from the OS would be a high-level format]. I'd also assume, given the size of your magnet, that ALL data on the disk was completely destroyed as well.
The carbon pads that make 'contact' with the platters are actually rather sensitive, so it is possible that the heads were offset. Another possibility is that the magnet corrupted the firmware, though that is unlikely as it is usually stored on solid state chips.
+SPEEDYxArcher
You could be right. The head/plate-distance has incredible low tolerances and is crucial for the HDD to work.
+SPEEDYxArcher My guess is that the magnet corrupted the boot sector of the drive - the firmware is fine, it's trying to scan properly, and the head stops where it needs to, but it just can't find the thing it's looking for.
+Ardusk if there were no boot sectors then drive would report no os erorr to the bios
Grzes kop I'm pretty sure that the "Error 2100: HDD0 (HardDisk Drive) initialization error" that we got in the last video is more serious than that. For a "No OS" error I imagine the computer needs to boot the hard drive, check for an OS, and then get back with a negative. If the boot sector is malformed, then it can't check for the OS because it simply doesn't know where to start looking.
as soon as I saw clicking realized the heads were fucked
3:44 i am not an expert in hdds but i heard a scratching noise from the readwrite heads
Only partitioned drives will appear in Windows Explorer, it's possible the magnate erased the MBR or GPT partitioning data casing it to not appear in Windows Explorer. However if you check in Windows Disk Management or in the BIOS it might appear, another potential issue that the Vista system could have be installed on GPT format and when connected to the older XP simply doesn't appear because the BIOS is not forward compatible with GPT, the drive may have appeared had it been tested on a GPT enable UEFI based computer. If you have any questions about my rambling just ask
These tests recorded via video are very well done and interesting to say the least. Thanks and continue to share similar experiments.
+Joseph Sunday
Thank you! More to come so stay tuned.
1st thing i would have tried would be to reformat. That is what a magnet messes up, the magnetically stored data. But if the tracks are completely gone I don't think a regular reformat will create new ones, it can only diddle the data in them.
Maybe the extreme magnetic field just threw the HDDs servo motors out of alignment? It might think it's moved the read head to the right position, but in reality it's off by a few millimeters.
The reading/writing head was bend up, so that it is too far away to read or write any Data to the disc. This distance is still to small to see anything.
Don't HDDs need air void to function?
If you could, do a video on how you store all your magnets, it would be really cool and I think a lot of people will like it!
When you put a magnet on the top of the hard drive the magnet wipes off all the sector and header marks making the disk completely useless and recognizable. Also Harddisk fails immediately when you open it up. No matter how gentle you were on the opening but tiny small particles and dust make the harddisk surface unreadable for the pointer.
Good drive can be used successfully for many minutes without cover before the dust particles kill it.
hard drives and USB drives have "files" on them that allow basic formatting and detection on computers. your magnet removed those basic files needed for detection. hard drives use magnetic discs with ether a positive attraction and a negative attraction... a 1 or a 0. these attractions make up the basic binary, so that's why a magnet wipes the data, it disrupts all the set attractions to a 1 or a 0 depending on what side of the magnet is facing it.
Hard drive stores diagnostic and running information on it's platters. If that's wiped out by the magnet the hard drive won't be able to function correctly, if at all. Newer hard drives have those plastic "skids" to keep the heads from scratching the disk during transport.
The dreaded HDD click noise. Still triggers anxiety attacks after all these years.
The platters store information in the magnet field like a VHS tape, And once you place a magnet near enough to affect that magnetic field, The magnet will runin the magnetic field on the platters rendering the hard drive useless.
After the magnet field on the platters is runied, You can not recover any data nor read/write to it.
Remember, most of the important information about the hard drive is stored on the platter, Once that is runied the hard drive is dead.
If I were to take a guess I would say that the large neodymium magnet permanently changed the polarity of a ferromagnetic piece of the drive. As I don't know for sure, it would be cool to look for field lines in all of the pieces with some magnet viewing film.
Well, isn't the firmware stored partly on the magnetic discs?
If it got erased, it would not boot correctly because something vital is missing
Smie87 no it's on a flash chip
Smie87 is right.
No. The firmware is stored in the Controller which is there on the drive.
@@beedslolkuntus2070 Well, what do you think about that? www.securedatarecovery.com/services/hard-drive-recovery/firmware-damage
The magnets demagnetized the magnets (or really screwed them up) that are used to control the read write heads and the magnet probably destroyed the low level on platter firmware. As a result the hard drive was completely rendered helpless. Data recycling companies often use these kind of magnets to completely destroy the low level formatted sector tracks and then the data so it will be gone forever. The magnet also probably warped the read write heads just enough short before a head crash but to prevent them from ever being able to read or write data anymore.
I think the giant magnet loosened a screw on the writehead's rotatey-joint and made it less aligned, causing the clicks.
Maybe magnetized or misaligned the read/write heads causing the disk to be unable to locate tracks hence the repeated seek. Could have burned out heads as well.
I love your videos! It's really interesting seeing magnetism demonstrated on camera with so much stuff, from HDDs to chemical elements. Cheers from Mexico!
+luneki
Thank you very much! Greetings from Denmark.
I think if you put the magnet near a floppy disk it will also erase data since floppy disks store data the same way like a HDD . Just that floppy disks are made of a different material.
thats the kind of name that would make X Æ -12 proud
I think the head is trying to find the low-level format information and because of the magnet, this has all gone.
In the old days as part of maintenance an engineer could do a low-level format but it's just done at the factory these days and the only thing an installation engineer or a user can do is a high-level format.
Those USB sata things don't work as well as an actual motherboard ... maybe it would have still worked.
Atleast you could have seen if the drive was recognised in the BIOS. And if it did ,you could have used a disk utility in Ubuntu to save it.
I feel like the pcb on the bottom side of the drive may have had a ram chip that was damaged (I've heard that at least some are controlled magnetically) because to my knowledge, no operation crucial data are stored on they platters. I believe it should be on rom chips and the computer should be able to detect it if the platters are blank.
0:55 sounds like they really wanted it to be electronic-screwdriver-set
The magnet destroyed a special area of the disk which is called the reserved area and not included in the formatted capacity. It tells the drive how much data each platter holds, contains bad block information and remapping data, smart test data, calibration data and the like. It also contains spare blocks to use so that bad blocks are remapped invisibly to the user. Since you destroyed this area, the drive is failing to initialize. Leave it on long enough and it will give up, spin down the platters and park the heads.
Mental note to self: if I ever get one of those evil magnets, take it through the kitchen and across to the workbench in its box. Do not pass the row of LTO-4 backup tapes!
based on the erratic movement of the heads id say you offset the magnetic field that it uses to control read position, you could have magnetized something that was not meant to be or you could have de magnetized something that was meant to be, or you could have changed how strong those neodymium magnets are, either by increasing or decreasing their strength
***** ok, my question i guess is how do the needles index their position, is it through field strength variation in witch case a bad bearing could mean the inability to read, or is it like a magnetic version of optical coder wheels and strips? where changing the position (if each platter has it) of the platter would have no effect and changing platters could not work no matter how much you format it if they don't have the same code ring?, if so why don't cd drives do that with just limit switches and dc motors instead of still having one or 2 limit switches anyway but having a stepper motor
The big magnet maked the screws magnetic because of this, the reader arm going to the magnetic parts ant makes the "click" sound.
Try connecting it to your laptop and opening Disk Partitioning Program to see if it detects it. Run a cmd and start disk part program, check if it's working there, usually windows doesn't recognizes not working disks from the normal gui.
This kind of damage is reminiscent of what happens when a hard drive is dropped. The head may or may not crash, and if it does it's unlikely to cause scratches on the platter as the platter is a hard material. It's possible that the head might be damaged by a crash, the arm is almost certainly misaligned (as when a rotational drive is dropped) and there may be other signs of damage such as traces, magnetic components and components sensitive to static electricity since you were probably causing electromagnetic induction throughout the laptop... It might even be possible that other components within the laptop have been damaged, for example I'd love to see memtest86 results! Though that'll probably require a new fan as the system will get HOT... I also noticed that both screens were reacting strangely. Was this due to the GPU overheating when the fan was exposed (and probably stopped)?
I still have a couple of those magnets "sticking" around from HDD I smashed open like 20 years ago.
My guess is that the hard drive deleted the data by switching the two poles North and South. The platters deleted data simply.
So the head if is on the platter it can detect data but by just on or off of the platter thats why it can detect the data.
I'd like to see if it's how long you're holding the magnet to the disc drive, try taking a laptop without a ssd and just pass over it quickly and if it has no effect slow down on the next pass and see if it's the amount of time near the magnet breaking them
Last time I did the magnet to an HDD it bend the little prong on the heads so it didn't read the platters, but it also formatted the platters to nothing
Hmm I'm not sure if it's been mentioned but it is likely that the head(s) became magnetized - rendering them unable to resolve data. Demagnetisation with a degausser *may* remove any magnetism but the data is going to be shafted either way :)
The read/write heads are broken , you may try to replace it for the drive to work again
I watched this video years ago and now it gives me this in my recommended
It might be the identifier, Hard disk identifiers are sensitive to magnets, the identifier might be damaged and could not recognize the read files from the hard disk. (Off the bat I'm not really a computer genius, it's just my guess, reply if I got anything incorrect)
U should try magnet vs SSHD or solid state hybrid drive, its basically a hdd and sdd bond together
As a CompTIA Certified IT Technician, your Neodymium Magnets caused permanent erasure of the blocks in the platters themselves, and also made the Drive Head unreadable.
why do you need sata to usb converter? isnt it easier to buy just a ready for use cable?
some HDDs use magnetic fields to determine if each bit is a 0 or a 1. using a giant magnet can secretly screw up the magnetization and the magnet itself.
hope this helps.
A SSD, Solid State Drive, is used for short-term data storage. So is the Hard Disk Drive, Which writes Low, Magnetic fields on the platter. But, dust is sort of a problem. A 3 NanoMeter clearance between the platter and the Head means that debree and dust scratch the platter, screwing up the head. Click read more for SSD and other info.
The Magnet may have not only "overlapped" the small magnetic field, BUT the read heads could have crashed into the platter.
Now, with SSD.
Solid State Drives are used for Short Term Data storage. The reason why is because SSD's use electrical currents to store data. These currents can "erode" overtime, so its best to keep it plugged in. These drives can not be hurt with a magnet.
If you had not opened it up you could probably find a method to run a low level format by connecting some diag port. The drive normally has preformatted sectors and couldn't find anything it expects anymore.
Brian, your videos are very instructive about neo-mag's and with PC Hard Drives! I indeed like your videos and I wish you very good luck with it!
+[OFFICIAL] xXxFTM2XxX (FranciscoTheMan2)
Thank you very much :)
Not sure if it was answered or not: those heads are not supposed to "touch" the disk like that. that is why it isn't working. they are out of alignment. after you opened it in a non sterile environment as well it just ensured it was totally screwed :P
I'm not sure I understand how harddrive RPMs work...if the platters spin at 120 RPM, how does that equal 7200? Are there 60 layers to all the platters in total?
"Alright, enough Danish lessons for today." 😂😂😂😂
Hard drives uses electromagnetic to write data in its sectors using the binary code 1's and 0's. 1's are magnetized and 0's are demagnetized. By applying a magnet to it your hard drive you turned all the 0's in to 1's braking the binary code. This is why the hard drive can't be read.
Elektronikskruetrækkersæt.
I think I know what happened to the HDD. So, you know that HDDs store information "magnetically" so the platters are magnetic and so are the head readers so they can like transfer data using Earth's magnetic field. When you put the neodymium magnet near the HDD, the data might have gone straight into the magnet. I know it sounds ridiculous, but that is what I think.
Running it without the head guide just makes it beep at you
Heya, loved your experiment. As for the examination, my guess would be the reading head's got magnetic and thus unable to read at all. But the data on that disk wouldn't be exactly readable either. Keep up the fun and informative videos, certainly makes my Sundays fun. regards warukata
The reading arm got damaged. You ever see what happens to a machine that wants to move one way but you are preventing it form moving that way?
I think like others said, the data and formatting have been destroyed / damaged. But I think you could have repaired the hard drive if you didn't open it, you could have completely wiped the whole disk with dban data destruction tool, then reformatted it. You said it was not detected by the computer but if you plugged it in the computer and booted into bios mode, then use dban to completely erase everything, then reformat it, that could work.
The reading arm without the head guide is just like "eww, no get it away"
The disk might not be working as the magnet may have corrupted something like the partition table or something, making it hard to boot from, or be recognised at all