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I've been thinking about this issue most of the day (yeah, I know "get a life Jessup!"), and I keep thinking that I heard something many years ago about some sort of assembly language program that could be run from a diskette (or now, a DVD or even a thumb drive), and the program would literally communicate with the hard drive, and force the heads to collide with (crash) the platter(s), thus rendering the drive useless.

I keep thinking it was a Seagate diagnostic which was pirated and corrupted into a destructive form, but I can't be sure. I found nothing on Google.

Anyone?

I've been thinking about this issue most of the day (yeah, I know "get a life Jessup!"), and I keep thinking that I heard something many years ago about some sort of assembly language program that could be run from a diskette (or now, a DVD or even a thumb drive), and the program would literally communicate with the hard drive, and force the heads to collide with (crash) the platter(s), thus rendering the drive useless.

That would only make the small proportion of the drive platters, under and adjacent to the drive heads when they crash, unreadable. The platters could be removed, cleaned up and placed back into a working drive to recover the data remaining on the rest of the drive. Also remember, the most recent data will have multiple copies on the drive due to deleted recent versions still being around.

Such a utility would be incredibly dangerous. Someone wanting to sabotage a business would only have to use a bootable floppy or USB drive to wreak havock. How many people or organizations disable booting from external devices or password protect the BIOS setup of their computers?