Manually formatting a hard drive.

Kevin Perez · Mar 17, 2014

Please let me know what will happen if I follow these steps. First, remove the internal IDE hard drive from the computer. Then place a fist sized magnet against the removed drive. I am guessing all the files will be deleted. Unfortunately, this may lead to one of two potential side effects. One is that the drive will be totally useless, and may never be used again. Secondly, the drive will not be formatted.

Has anyone tried formatting a hard drive in this manner?

Spectre694 · Mar 17, 2014

Why? You would need a pretty good magnet modern drives are shielded fairly well. It would be easier to format it the normal way

hunter315 · Mar 17, 2014

You won't erase the disk that way, merely corrupt the data on the drive, there will still be a large amount of recoverable data on that disk. If you want to erase all the data tell windows to format it but don't do a quick format, do a full format and it will blank the drive when it does it. If you want a secure delete there are programs out there that will format the drive and overwrite everything with garbage data and repeat to make sure you can't undo the formatting.

ko888 · Mar 17, 2014

There is already an extremely powerful permanent magnet inside the hard disk drive that is used for the actuator and yet that doesn't affect the data stored on the drive.

ss202sl · Mar 17, 2014

A drive degausser creates a large enough magnetic field to render a drive useless. This is what you are talking about.

ex_bubblehead · Mar 17, 2014

Even if it worked it would render the drive completely unusable. One of the platters contains the servo tracks that are used to position the heads. These tracks can only be written at the factory, and if corrupted or erased, the drive becomes a brick.

Spectre694 · Mar 17, 2014

ko888 :

Thats because it has to be a very strong magnet. Either a large Neodymium type magnet or what I did and accidentally bring your portable drive (killed it) into an MRI at work it is very hard to do but possible.

ko888 · Mar 17, 2014

Using an external magnet or magnetic field is not called formatting.

Kevin Perez · Mar 17, 2014

Spectre694 :

There are a number of reasons I would use a magnet and not Window's format function/feature. One is that the computers have files that absolutely need to be deleted. Another one is the computers are no longer setup. Thirdly, even if they were setup, formatting a hard drive can take hours. Granted hooking up the computers only takes a couple of minutes, so the second reason is more of an excuse.

In regards to the third reason, I have heard stories about even fully formatting a hard drive, does not make the old files permanently unrecoverable. Granted I have only heard stories, and the stories could be myths. Anyone here able to verify that after formatting a HD, the files can not possibly be accessed?

USAFRet · Mar 18, 2014

To your 3 points:

1. DBAN. It was designed for exactly this.
2. A USB dock or cable, connected a running PC
3. Hours? If its not impacting what else you're doing, does it matter?

Spectre694 · Mar 18, 2014

Kevin Perez :

If you are that paranoid get one of those programs that write a bunch of data to the drive after they format it. Also any magnet that is strong enough to reliably remove all data from the HDD i strong enough to brick the drive.If that is your end goal a hammer will save you some time.

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