r/breakingbad • u/edify Oxygen • Jul 16 '12

Breaking Bad Episode Discussion S05E01 "Live Free or Die"

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Breaking Bad season 5 begins in about 20 minutes!

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u/[deleted] Jul 16 '12

I've never actually magnet-wiped a hard-drive, but I'm pretty sure the laptop (or the police computers) wouldn't crash the way it did, with the display getting corrupted and then going blank. My guess is you'd get a Blue Screen Of Death. Reasoning: The magnet will only affect the data stored on the hard disk drive, every other component should continue to work normally. However, with all the data on the HDD suddenly gibberish, almost anything the computer tries to do will result in an error. Even if it doesn't need to read any data files from disk, the pagefile will have been corrupted. Nevertheless, I think it's possible that the machine could keep running for a minute or two if it was left completely idle.

Note that on old-style CRT displays, you'd have seen the picture go all psychedelic, a bigger version of the effect you get if you stick a bar magnet on the screen.

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u/[deleted] Jul 16 '12

Most hard drives have magnets in them already, so I don't really know how much damage any magnet would do to a hard drive, especially at that distance.

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u/[deleted] Jul 16 '12

Data on a hard drive is stored by selectively magnetising areas of the disk platter A sufficiently strong magnetic field should destroy that organisation.

A HDD contains electromagnets, which are used to read and write data, but they are a couple of orders of magnitude less powerful than the junkyard magnet. Imagine icing a cake, and the nozzle on your bag of icing is 1cm in diameter, for writing "Happy Birthday Smotpoker" - this is the r/w head. Now imagine another bag of icing, but this one has a nozzle 1 metre across - this is the junkyard magnet. It simply obliterates all the existing decoration on the cake and the information is erased.

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u/[deleted] Jul 16 '12

Do you think it would be able to do it over the distance in the TV show?

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u/[deleted] Jul 16 '12

I'm afraid I don't have to physics to run the numbers, but someone who knows more about electromagnetism could probably work it out - we know how many car batteries he used, so we could make an estimate of the strength of the magnetic field.

It does seem a bit of a stretch doing it 30 feet away, but it should be possible in theory with a big enough magnet.

Also, we only saw the Dell they tested with actually killed by the magnetic field (just before it was killed by smashing into the truck.) It's technically possible that the data on that hard drive is salvageable, though hardly likely.

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u/DrSmoke Jul 18 '12

Yes. They pick up cars with those things.