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The hard drive is not deceptive in its nomenclature at all. They are hard. Hard to open, hard to drive (perhaps impossible to drive), and the parts inside are hard too.
But, hard drives are fun. The platters are great to put your fingerprints all over and then throw like frisbees. Older hard drives have lots of large platters. Newer ones are smaller.
Most hard drives carry a warning label as seen in figure 4.1, threatening dire things if you play with the drive. These should be ignored. Better yet, they should be blatantly violated, perhaps by drilling straight through the warning label or cracking it open and then reassembling the broken label and mounting it on a plaque to show everyone how Tough and Unabashed you are.
[img]http://members.aol.com/spoons1000/break/warning.jpg[/img]
Here we see the drive, opened up using the screwdriver with the appropriate shape (this one was star-shaped). The screws can also be drilled out, but that is less elegant. There is also the ominous claw-hammer looming in the background...
[img]http://members.aol.com/spoons1000/break/pristine.jpg[/img]
This is a low-level calibration of the drive, done with the hammer from figure 4.2. Note that the unreliable areas of the drive surface which were marked as "bad sectors". Also note that the drive is stubbornly resistant to calibration.
[img]http://members.aol.com/spoons1000/break/calibrate.jpg[/img]
shows partitioning of the drive using an ordinary hacksaw. Partitioning in this manner is advantageous over fdisk because it allows partitioning of individual platters and is independent of operating system. You also get to make cute designs.
[img]http://members.aol.com/spoons1000/break/defrag2.jpg[/img]
The platters can be removed with the same screwdriver as before (or by drilling down the axle -- clamp the platters down so they don't spin with it), and are the best part of the hard drive. The remaining hardware can be discarded (drive electronics are not so fun to break since they are usually surface-mount). The platters are heavy and substantial and fly through the air pretty well. They also are remarkably good at violently breaking the skulls of other people and setting off car alarms, so be careful where you throw them. Figure 4.5 shows a pristine platter straight off the drive.
[img]http://members.aol.com/spoons1000/break/platter.jpg[/img]
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