(no subject)

[cirobi.livejournal.com]

has anyone ever encountered a PC that while wiping the contents of the hard drive... spontaneously started opening and closing it's DVD-Rom tray? i don't think i've ever encountered this until just now and it's really rather creepy. the button on the drive doesn't look compressed or stuck in any way either. it'll open the tray, shutter between starting to close and reopening it and then close the whole way and then reopen and close, etc. ugh, only 20% more to wipe and i can shut down the beast...

Comments

[fragbert.livejournal.com]

Maybe it's the equivalent of HAL singing "Daisy" when his upper memory was wiped?

[cirobi.livejournal.com]

lol. maybe. though, it continued after the drive was completely wiped. *ponders*

[firewallender.livejournal.com]

LOL

That HAL comment kills me... hahaha. :-)

[fragbert.livejournal.com]

*bows*

I thank you.

[jahbulon.livejournal.com]

Nice one ;)

[samwize.livejournal.com]

Hmmm... faulty cable/IDE Bus? That's a little weird, yeah.

[twitchfetish.livejournal.com]

sounds more coincidental than causal...

Bus?

IV

[indigo-max.livejournal.com]

How you wiping the HD. The method I normally use is to boot the thing up with an old Win98 boot disk, fdisk the partitiions and be done with it.

Max...

[jecook]

My company used a free boot disk called DBAN.

It's a Linux bootdisk/bootCD that will wipe drives usuing DoD compliant methods.

The reason my company uses it is because we have to be HIPPA compliant, and I'm a slight paranoid as well...

[indigo-max.livejournal.com]

We have to worry about security issues as well at the Community College I work at. Most of the wipes I do are for rebuilds. I should note that I use a few more methods, especially on rebuilds, then just fdisk. I also use a tool that came with a copy of Imagecast that we used to use. The thing wipes track 0. From there I repartition the disk and then do a dos reformat.

If I have a unit that I am surplusing and gettting rid of..well a few second on a deguasser handles that well enough for our needs. Most DoD compliant methods take forever and a day to perform. At least the ones that I have used.

Max...

[cirobi.livejournal.com]

we use a BartPE CD with symantec's ghosting client on it to reimage drives or back up drives. I've only ever used symantec's ghosting client, so i've never heard of Imagecast. *shrug*

[trixtah.livejournal.com]

Imagecast has pretty similar functionality to Ghost. Slightly cheaper, tho', if I remember rightly. Oh, and they got the multicast thing working better at an earlier stage.

[cirobi.livejournal.com]

hm, interesting. until it was mentioned on here i'd never heard about it. =p i'm guessing we have some deal or something since we use symantec corporate. *shrug*

[teriwyn.livejournal.com]

My DoD site will frequently incinerate old drives. ;)

[kayfox.livejournal.com]

People have asked me why I have a sledge hammer in my toolbox.

Wiping harddrives is the only practical reason, all the rest is mystical.

[cirobi.livejournal.com]

we have some strange thing in my desk called "the tool" or "the stick" we have no idea where it came from and it's been there since long before i was hired. basically a metal rod with a rubber handle. doesn't belong to anything particular but i'll be damned if i haven't wanted to put it to use to a couple machines that have come through my office. =p

[jecook]

Heh.

I have a rubber panel beating mallet, and a 20 oz. framing hammer in my "unified" toolkit which has stuff to work on computers and stuff to run cables.

[cirobi.livejournal.com]

hehe. the other day my workstudy was helping me clean the office (it was in shambles from some major deployments and returned equipment) and we found a wrench set. nothing in my position requires me to use heavy duty wrenchs. =p

[jecook]

Interesting.

The sole reason why I carried an adjustable wrench during my traveling entwork engineer days was to put togather/take apart/tighten screws on two post telcomm racks.

[cirobi.livejournal.com]

see, that would make sense but all i do is software builds, some minor hardware troubleshooting/replacement and make our computer labs look pretty. so far i haven't found anything large enough to require a wrench. *smirk* well, aside from maybe the occasional stupid user

[cirobi.livejournal.com]

i boot to an old 98 disk and then use gdisk to wipe it. we have to do a very thorough wiping of the hard drives because i work at a law school and they're very VERY particular about things. if it were my own computer i'd probably just fdisk the partitions as well, but not here. sometimes, like with one of the dean's old computers, we actually gdisk'd the machine 5+ times. then again, dean of a law school, yea know... have to be a bit more careful. =p

[indigo-max.livejournal.com]

I use cleardrv from the Imagecast tools disk to wipe track 0 after doing an fdisk.

Max...

[cirobi.livejournal.com]

what is "the Imagecast tools disk" you speak of?

[indigo-max.livejournal.com]

It came with our version of Imagecast. I just remember finding the program as I was going through disks in the desk one afternoon. Imagecast was what we used to use for our PC imaging platform. We use Ghost now and I don't know if they have a similiar tool or not.

Max...

[jecook]

There is a wipedisk utility bundles with older version of the Symantec product quite (it was part of Norton utilities).

I've never used it.

[cirobi.livejournal.com]

yea, i never used that either. used to have an old version of Norton utilities for my home PC. i've only ever used fdisk/gdisk or the format you get with a windows install. the last not being the greatest format, but fine for quick jobs.

[teriwyn.livejournal.com]

I remember that from the old DOS version of Norton Utilities. If I recally correctly, it would subsequently write 0's and 1's and then 0's again to the drive, repeatedly. You could specify how many passes.

[attackgypsy.livejournal.com]

Maybe its possessed.

Yws, I actually told a user that once. Fortunately, it was someone who called us all the time, and with whom I had a very good relationship.

[cirobi.livejournal.com]

me, one of my coworkers and the former user of the machine all think it's possessed. =p it's only half jokingly though. doesn't really matter one way or another since we're wiping all the drives and then selling the machines since they're pretty old. still... i think i'll leave the note my coworker put on it about "having a CD-Rom issue" =p

[taiki.livejournal.com]

Sounds like a virus.

THe drive door can be open and closed via an ATAPI command.

[cirobi.livejournal.com]

that's one helluva virus then since i was wiping the drive at the time and it did it well after the drive was clean. =p

[taiki.livejournal.com]

that was my initial reaction because drive doors just don't open themselves up like that EVER. In my experience atleast.

[cirobi.livejournal.com]

yea, exactly why we've labled it "possessed." when it was doing it inside windows (which i found out after i'd wiped it already) i would have definitely said potential virus, but the post-mortem occurrance is definitely a more deep-seated issue or just faulty hardware somehow. always an adventure regardless.