Physical destruction of a laptop hard drive

Tonight I spent some time destroying two hard drives for an old laptop that I no longer use. Both were hard disk drives. I had previously backed up the data on the hard drives, and then wiped the drives, but I wanted to take the additional step of making whatever remained on them physically impossible to access.

After wiping the drives, I tried to recover data from them using recovery tools included with the Hiren BootCD (see here), just to confirm the wiping software had been effective.

The first step was to remove the battery, so any chance of an electric shock could be eliminated. Next using a precision screwdriver, I removed the covers for the two drives in the laptop, which were both secured inside with metal braces, which also had to be removed.

The drives each had a controller board on one side, and a metal plate on the opposite side.

I did not have the right tools to unscrew the metal plate, so I drilled through each drive from the side with the controller board.

Drilling one hole took several minutes with a no-frills Black & Decker drill. While I managed to put two deep holes in each drive, I was not able to penetrate past the metal plate case on the opposite side.

A lot of people make the mistake of ending their effort to physically destroy a drive at this point. However, it is possible for the platters in the HDDs to still be intact after holes like these have been drilled. See for example this video posted by @cfldriven in which he demonstrates how drives with large drill holes . . .

. . . still have platters from which data can be recovered:

I couldn't pry off the metal plate to reveal the platters on my drives, but I was able to open up the holes I drilled further with a screwdriver and confirm that the platters had been smashed.

It was possible to hear the pieces rattling around inside, and several small broken shards spilled out of the case.

Of course, the more common solid state drives used in most laptops manufactured in recent years don't have platters, and drilling several holes in them may leave some of the chips on which they store data undamaged.

An iPhone Knows Your Significant Locations

Keep in mind that iPhones use a particular method to track the smartphone's location known as 'significant locations'. This function can be accessed under Privacy and Security in Location Services.

. . . after the list of app specific settings in Location Services you'll find 'System Services' [note the color coded flag of a gray arrow showing that an app has tracked the phone's location in the last 24 hours and a purple arrow when an app has tracked the location very recently.]

Scroll down and you'll see the 'Significant Locations' option.

Apple states that the location data is encrypted, and that it cannot access it itself - (unless it is subpoenaed to produce it??).

The Apple policy linked to under 'Significant Locations' states that it uses the data to track the movements of groups of people and automobile traffic. Note that Apple also reserves the ability to estimate your location based on your IP address.

Rufus - How to create bootable media with ISO files

If you have a flash drive or disc from which you want to access a program when booting up in BIOS, the data can be saved in an .iso file - which acts as a virtual drive. The .iso image file holds the data in binary format. However you cannot download an .iso file and simply copy it to a flash drive, the standard way in Windows Explorer. To save an .iso file to a flash drive, use a free utility named Rufus, which is available here. Use the portable, or standalone version, which does not need to be installed:

[FWIW, I scanned it using Bitdefender and it was clean.] Rufus will run from the downloaded executable file and give you the option to select which flash drive you want to add an .iso image to

Rufus may take 15 minutes or more to copy an .iso file to flash drive. I used it to add the .iso file for Hiren's BootCD PE to the flash drive - it downloads from the site as a single file, 'HBCD_PE_x64.iso'. [Hiren's includes several data recovery tools, and I needed to use it to check if the drive of an old laptop I was decommissioning had been successfully wiped.].

It will take Rufus longer than an hour to add a 3 GB file to a flash drive.

When the Hiren Boot .iso file is added, you will see multiple files and folders.

I inserted the flash drive into the laptop that I wiped, and pressed F12 [the laptop was a Toshiba - other hardware may require another function key] to enter BIOS - the firmware. The flash drive was recognized:

. . . .Hiren's BootCD PE successfully ran: