He smashed it with a hammer to get access to the platters, and scarred the platters with a screwdriver.
Unless the platters are physically shattered in a few thousand pieces, it is possible to reconstruct at least some data from them.
Also consider if they’re SSDs. SSDs can easily be destroyed with a magnet or a hammer. Destroy flash chips and the data is unrecoverable. Unless a platter is physically shattered, data can still be recovered. It’s all about the magnet integrity of the disk. I’ve seen data pulled from HDDs that were physically crushed but the platters were still intact.
No. I usually just use a hammer. Scoring the platters would be a reasonable (but probably unnecessary) step to prevent data recovery.
Even in that condition companies that specialize in data recovery can get things off of it.
***He smashed it with a hammer to get access to the platters, and scarred the platters with a screwdriver. ***
I pulled my hard drive from an old computer and tried to destroy it. I sat it on a cement car port, took a 6 foot long 1 inch thick steel bar with a chisel tip, and smashed, smashed, smashed! I could not break the hard drive! I bent it a little, but could not break it. Finally I threw it in a burn pile and “heat treated” it.
He probably dismantled the metal enclosure with a torx screw driver and then bent the platters inside by hitting them with a hammer.
A few months back I did about the same thing to a couple of hard drives I'd taken out of an old computer. Used a hammer, screwdriver and pliers to break the metal housing open and then to cut and scratch the disc before throwing it away.
Some are looking for far too much meaning in the sentence that mentions a "hammer or a screwdriver". Most likely just sloppy writing and reporting, which has been incredibly plentiful since this terrible story broke.
Then why a hammer “or” screwdriver? Wouldn’t it be natural to say “and”, and odd to say “or”?
This isn’t evidence of anything - except perhaps a spokesman who doesn’t know the English language very well.
I thot this dumbass kid was a flaming genius? His computer lab perfessor claims the punk was a real wiz putting stuff together. So the best he can do is take his computer apart with a hammer? Reminds me of a kid I grew up with——when he wanted to take something apart he always started with a hammer——but that’s the only tool he had so he finished with the hammer too. He was usually looking for ball bearings to play marbles with. Seems like the Newton Nutcase never had any marbles to start with? If he was a true geek and not just a gamer he would have known how to destroy memory /files/etc. More suspicions all around.