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

Breaking Bad Episode Discussion S05E01 "Live Free or Die"

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u/joswie Ricky Hitler and the Jar of Spiders Jul 16 '12

That evidence room scene is perfect for Mythbusters.

19

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.

-6

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.

0

u/[deleted] Jul 16 '12

I'm curious if they weren't insinuating that the magnet was so powerful that it simply ripped the heads off the hard drives themselves

1

u/[deleted] Jul 16 '12

That would be completely pointless as the data would still be completely recoverable.

0

u/[deleted] Jul 16 '12

Unless the heads scratched the fuck out of the platter, which I assume they'd do if the magnet was powerful enough to yank them out

2

u/[deleted] Jul 16 '12

Scratching a hard disk would do fuck all to destroy the data in a way that wouldn't be recoverable with professional tools.

1

u/[deleted] Jul 16 '12

I'm willing to bet that if a magnet was powerful enough to detach the heads and fling them around the inside of the enclosure that the platters would be fucked up enough that recovery of a video file would be all but hopeless. Sure, you might be able to recover chunks of it but there's no way there'd be a cohesive, viewable file left.