I was watching Law & Order the other night and the cops raided some kids house and seized his PC. As they went out the door, one of the guys in charge freaked out and realized that the kid had a very powerful magnet on his door frame, essentially wiping out his HD. He called it a specific name but I can't recall what it was. Is such a thing possible? I know that magnets will mess up hard drives, but to erase the whole thing that fast? Are the HDs recoverable (by govt. specs) at all after that? And what else would it affect? (Phones, mp3 players, etc.) Thanks.
Yes, magnets are very deadly when they come close to hard drives. They probably wont erase all data, but will definetly make the disc unreadable. I think the best bet would be to completely destroy the HDD, with fire, or a gun, because the FBI and government are really good at recovering data. Not real sure what else is affected, most likely an iPod will be because it has a hard drive inside.
The only uber-powerful compact magnets I can think of are Lithium earth magnets. You certainly wouldn't want to run them over the hard drives or touch them, but unless they were right next to the drive, I doubt they'd do any harm, it takes a lot of magnetic force to wipe a hard drive.
