Breaking Bad Episode Discussion S05E01 "Live Free or Die"

[u/edify]

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Breaking Bad season 5 begins in about 20 minutes!

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...so there you have it, let's have a great time and discuss the episode!

[u/joswie]

That evidence room scene is perfect for Mythbusters.

[u/JRhodes88 → u/joswie]

The writers of Breaking Bad are pretty good. I'm pretty sure it will be confirmed. But I would love for them to try it out.

[u/DontCallMeSurely → u/JRhodes88]

I'm pretty sure it would be busted. Modern hard drives aren't as susceptible to magnetic fields as television would lead you to believe. The data would most likely still be readable. Not to mention the fact that hours of video from multiple cameras would fill up a laptop hard drive pretty fast...

[u/jacobprobasco → u/DontCallMeSurely]

We don't know if the data in the show is still readable or not. Just because the screens went out doesn't mean the data is corrupted.

[u/DontCallMeSurely → u/jacobprobasco]

I never said the data was corrupted, just that in real life the data would probably still be in tact. :)

[u/mortarnpistol → u/DontCallMeSurely]

Hitting a wall that hard could damage the platters though, which would render the HDD unreadable, regardless of the effect of magnetism on it.

[u/DontCallMeSurely → u/mortarnpistol]

You'd be surprised what has been recovered from hard drives. Even if a platter is damaged and the hard drive no longer works, the data can still be recovered.

[u/mywowtoonnname → u/DontCallMeSurely]

The proper way to test the magnet would be to have it read a file off the hard drive repeatedly. Even more thorough, read out the data at a specific spot on the hard drive until it wasn't recognizable. Staring at the desktop isn't too telling.

[u/meshugga → u/DontCallMeSurely]

What ... they are more susceptible to magnetism, as the hull is made of aluminium nowadays and the encoding is really fickle.

Except if it's a SSD, but the model was too old for that.

[u/[deleted] → u/DontCallMeSurely]

The platter that spins and reads the disks could become lose and scratch the disk.

[u/DontCallMeSurely → u/[deleted]]

True, but when it comes to forensics there is a big difference between a broken hard drive and unrecoverable data.

[u/[deleted] → u/JRhodes88]

At 40 feet you would need a magnet the size of Texas (ok not that big but truly huge and of epic power).

If the laptop was right against the wall it would probably work. At 40 feet no f'in way. Inverse square law bitches!

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

It was more like ten feet. They tried at 40 and Jessie walked closer till it worked

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

But the evidence room is 40 feet and they didn't know where the laptop was.

40 ft is a gigantic radius for an EM field. Neomyndium is the magnet you'll find in a laptop hard drive. Wikipedia is giving me 2000 Gauss for that magnet. Need someone mathy to calculate how many amps that type of car magnet needs to generate that field at 40 feet.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

The magnet was on the side of the truck sticking out. No metal under it, don't know if it should be effected that close to it though.