Computer geeks unite

[frickenjoey]

That's the ticket Woodie.....I love smashing me some hard drives. I used a cold chisel and a hammer.....punch a few holes through the platters. I would call that pretty much done.

 

[Cupooterluvr]

There's a video I remember of some company's shredders completely annihilating some hard drives. It was cool to watch, but I'm at school right now so I can't find it.

 

[beason]

You geeks make me chuckle. When I replace a drive and want to ensure that the contents of the old drive is gone I simply take the drive to the garage, take hammer and beat on the drive until the platters inside are shattered. I then throw away the drive - no data is recoverable from it.

Then again I'm also the same one that will put a used CD with data on it in the microwave for 3 seconds before throwing it away when no longer needed.

we actually have a machine for that. it punches thousands of divots in the plastic and label side of the disk. two passes in that thing and there is no way that disk will ever be read.

 

[Rolex]

Nailed it WoodiE! I've been doing that for years. 3 second nuke, watch the sparks fly, then check out the beautiful "Dry lake bed" pattern on the disk.

 

[RC Addict]

Hard drives and CD's... Hard drives make great long distance targets for my AR-15. CD's are good shotgun fodder. In both cases the media is sufficiently unreadable!

 

[hamz9561]

Rolex, if the machine came with Windows ME (Money Edition) try a minor upgrade to Win 2K instead of XP. That's what I've done on numerous machines that I have had to restore without the disk on those older machine.

 

[Rolex]

Well, I just spoke to the previous owner, and YES! The disk is there. I'll have it tonight.

 

[flm_savage]

gah, all of these posts could have been avoided. thanks timex.

 

[Rolex]

Well, between these posts and my research, I found out that it could ONLY be done with the disk. Usually there's a way to get it from the partitioned drive, and that's what I was looking for.
Hey, several people got geekier because of this thread. :

 

[neobart]

Yeah yeah, and there are only 10 kind of people in the world.



The ones who read binary, and the ones who do not. :


I started out with a Olivetti 80286 with a whopping 20Mb hard drive.

 

[flm_savage]

mine was a Packard Bell 486SX 25mhz with 2mb ram and a 100mb hdd. Rocking windows 3.1

That was the first time i ever really got interested in electronics. Our psu blew a fuse after my dad explain what it did, i asked if we could put a nail in its place long enough for me to play sim city 2000 and 3000. There was another game that i LOVED but can't remember the name of. It was based in outer space and i know the other race resembled tigers. Anybody know?

 

[neobart]

That's Wing Commander. The feline looking aliens were called the Kilrathi. Geeez I'm a geek.

 

[flm_savage]

That's Wing Commander.

YES! i just found it and was coming back to post it. Man i loved that game. I would wake up at 4AM to play it before school. Such a good game.

 

[beason]

i had an acer 486 dx2 with win 3.1 i played wolfenstine 3d on it! upgraded the ram and loaded 95 on it.

 

[Rolex]

That's Wing Commander. The feline looking aliens were called the Kilrathi. Geeez I'm a geek.

You've got some serious geekdom going on.
I had a Vic-20, with a cassette tape drive.
I bypassed the Commodore 64 and went straight to the 80mb 3.1.

Any one ever heard of Kaypro? I still have one in immaculate condition. Not really a computer, but a great word processor in its day. No hard drives. OS and files were on 5 1/2 floppies. I still have all the manuals and accessories.

 

[neobart]

Sorry Rolex I'm gonna have to uber-geek you, it's 5 1/4 and 3 1/2 and then there's 8" which I'm sure you're old enough to remember.

Damn I remember installing a windows 95 beta, took 18 floppys to install, and microsoft office was 31 floppys. eeek

 

[hamz9561]

My first computer was a Timex/Sincalir with a Chiclet style keyboard, 4k of RAM and a cassette drive. Gee, am I an old geek!

 

[flm_savage]

Damn I remember installing a windows 95 beta, took 18 floppys to install, and microsoft office was 31 floppys. eeek

oh yeah!! haha. i still have 3.1 on floppy and probably office as well. We backed up our whole pc on floppies.

The first thing i printed was a list of all know virus's. It took nearly a full ribbon on my dot matrix

 

[Rolex]

You're right, 5 1/4. I have never seen an 8" disk, but I do remember the huge 16" spools of tape almost 3" thick that shuttled back and forth while thousands of little lights blinked.

Speaking of Dot Matrix, she was that hot chick that taught me flow charting on the 1401.

 

[flm_savage]

ok guys, impress me. In middle school there was something that we used to watch videos on. The disk that went into it was the size of a vinyl record. What was it.