Are Motherboards safe?

mildgamer001

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I have several old desktop computers that do not work and i dont have the parts to fix, one i am certain the motherboard doesnt work and the other i am fairly certain it has something to do with motherboard issues, and i dont have the parts to try rebuilding it anyway, these are both 1998-2001 computers and i am getting rid of them (after i wip ethe hard drives with heavy duty magnets to erase any data), they dont work anyway, two have issues with the OS and i dont have the disks so i cant fix or the need to fix if i could. but i dont want to throw them away because they were buisness computers for a real estate company and it isnt good if the data on them gets stolen, maybe by someone with more computer experience than me.

Anyway, i have these two old motherboards, one has an old pentium II and the other is an original AMD Athlon, not sure if either is very collectable yet or not, but i like having them. So, i wanted to keep the boards as decorations, maybe hang them on my bedroom wall, since one is all gold and the other a deep purple, not to mention i think motherboards just look neat in general. My mother (these were from her old real estate buisness, as i said before) wanted to know if they had murcury in them, if they do, i cant use them, if they do, im hanging them up.

Do Motherboards from that era have any murcury in them? or any other chemicals/materials that can be harmful out in the open? i will also be removing the cmos batteries and disposing of them. Oh, and do old Memory chips have anything bad in them as well?

Thanks.
 
Solution
There shouldn't be any harmful chemicals in them at all.

They are made from a PCB with copper and gold wires, and plastic.

There may be some lead (pB) in the solder, because I believe that was before solder had to be made without lead. But that is not harmful unless you manage to break off a solder into a blood vein....

There is nothing that is going to hurt you if you hang it on your wall.

Unless it falls of the wall and gives you a bloody nose in the middle of the night that is... lol
There shouldn't be any harmful chemicals in them at all.

They are made from a PCB with copper and gold wires, and plastic.

There may be some lead (pB) in the solder, because I believe that was before solder had to be made without lead. But that is not harmful unless you manage to break off a solder into a blood vein....

There is nothing that is going to hurt you if you hang it on your wall.

Unless it falls of the wall and gives you a bloody nose in the middle of the night that is... lol
 
Solution
I've seen old hardware used as furniture a few times. +5 geek cred. :sol: There's quite a bit of "recycling" projects on google.
motherboard_table-5188102.jpg

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If you want to ensure no data is recovered from the drives just use a screw driver to take the screws out and open the case.

Then take out the physical disks, the round plates.

Then using some method or other actually bend the things over in half. Feel free to hit it with a hammer on cement or something in order to make sure it is flat.

If you bend the platters in half like this, nobody on earth will be able to recover the data from it.

Using a magnet isn't guaranteed. Just use the method I suggested. You should be able to do all the hard drives in under an hour and it is great for peace of mind.
 
Take a hammer to the hard drives. No data recovery possible then.

To find out if the motherboards have any value, market them on e-bay. Some of the older motherboards have a small bit of recoverable gold.
But I doubt that they are worth anything.

I would not worry about any contamination. If you are concerned, get some clear plastic resin, put the motherboard in a picture frame, and pour the resin in, enough to cover everything.
 

aaab

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With the correct screw driver my record is 5:43 :D

Otherwise it takes quite a lot longer to break though the screws, of course this method it a great stress release !
 


You can hit the hard drives with a sledge hammer and do no damage to the physical plates. If anything a sledge hammer would give you a false sense of security unless you take apart the drives and examine the plates.

If you are going to do that, you might as well do it in reverse order to ensure you don't have to hit it with a hammer a second time.

Opening it up with a screw driver and bending the plates in half is guaranteed to work whereas most other methods aren't.

Theoretically, if you can get a screw driver through the plates, that will work equally as well, but that is also hard to do easily without taking them out.
 


I agree, breaking things can be pretty theraputic.

One time I had to do like 200 hard drives on behalf of a defense contractor with hard drives that had information on them that would have been potentially detrimental to the U.S. if it got into the hands of an enemy nation dumpster diver.

By the time I got done with them, I was quite efficient at it.

There were a few other people assisting me with this, but they were lazy and I had to go back through and re-inspect their work and most of it was sub-par. I spent as much time destroying the platters they left intact as I spent destroying the ones that I did. If I supplied all the man hours on this project it would have been done a lot more quickly in terms of man hours, but it would have taken much longer in real time since I wasn't going to put in more than 8 hour days doing this.
 
I didn't say it would be easy to recover it, but it is possible for a determined person to recover the data if the plates are intact.

The easiest thing to recover is a completely undamaged hard drive. Not that I want to tell anyone how to do identity theft, but there are thousands of completely undamaged hard drives in land fills everywhere with credit card numbers completely intact. Most aren't even formatted much less low level formatted or physically damaged.

It is all about making your data harder to read than the next guy's data.

It doesn't get much harder to read than to have platters that are bent completely in half.

The person would have to have something that could bend it back completely flat in order to recover the data. As far as I know, such a thing hasn't been invented. There would still be warping if anyone tried using any technology that I know of which would cause the arm that is a couple nanometers above the surface to scratch on the plate and which would vary the distance to the plate and a host of other problems that would require more money to fix than the value of the data.

Technically, the screw driver right through each platter method is probably more foolproof, but it also takes a lot longer than folding the platter in half does.

It may be worthwhile to do it on the micro scale with 2 or 3 hard drives, but it doesn't scale up well to, say, 200 hard drives.

In any event, folding them in half can be done quite quickly and it makes your data harder to recover than 99.9999999999999% of everyone else's data.
 

aaab

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I had about the same number of HDD's to destroy. Easiest were definatly the glass ones but they made a hell of a mess.

Also had about 100 (stacked up to the roof) old dell workstations (mostly working) we had to run a program called 'destory' across all of them.

It's hard to get data back from a broken HDD even when the platters are in tact. It takes the right tools and a fair bit of skill. By just removing the circuit boards it's not too hard to get the data off that! But also not just anyone can do this, and you would be very unlucky if someone did.
 
If you low level formatted a drive, writing over every bit with a 1 and then writing over every bit with a 0 it should be hard enough to recover the data that it isn't worth it.

I don't know what your destroy program does, but I am assuming it does a low level format.

However, I have heard of data being recovered from drives even when it is overwritten like that. Something about the physical disk having multiple layers and its possible to see through the current layer to the layer under it or some craziness like that.

I don't have experience with that, because the organization I was with set the standard at physically unrecoverable plates.

Both are probably good enough for most intents and purposes, but I would hate to have to turn on 200 computers individually and run programs on all of them and then to have that little thought in the back of my mind that some technology somewhere might be able to defeat this process.

The hardest to defeat methods are the ones most grounded in the physical world.

Case in point, the easiest way to acquire sensitive government data is not to hack the organization's network, it is to drive up to the data center with guns and walk out with servers and drive off without getting caught.

If some sort of hardware could indeed examine the physical disks and see data that has been overwritten, it would be infinitely easier to scale that up to recover data from, say, 200 hard drives that had been low level formatted than it would be to invent a device that could recover the data from 200 hard drives that had been folded in half.

Again, this is mostly a physical thing. If you folded the plates from 200 hard drives in half, each one would be ever so minorly different from each other one. That would mean it would be hard to create a one size fits all solution to unfolding them. Anything that would do 1 automatically would not be able to do more than maybe 5% of them automatically. Then it would have to be changed to do more of them.

I was using a hammer to ensure a flat fold on mine, so the actual physical platter had even more damage than just the folding to undo if it was going to be undone.

In any event, just ripping out the circuit board would be one of the easiest bits of damage to undo. Easier to undo than low level formatting by a long way.

There is no reason for the average person sponsored by an extremely wealthy entity to want to go after average joe's credit card information. Nobody wants to spend $100,000+ in order to identity theft somebody for $500 or maybe even as high as $5000.

Still, there is peace of mind in going the extra mile to protect data that is pretty high stakes.

For those who want that peace of mind and they are willing to spend 5 or 10 minutes to get it, destroying the physical plates is definitely the way to go.
 
Not sure what you mean by gassing them, but if it did physical damage to the drives I guess it would be fine enough.

I mean if you managed to melt down hard drive platters in an industrial strength furnace at 5000 degrees and all that came out was a puddle of liquid, I think it would be hard to recover data from it.