> The only times I've heard of destroying hardware with software have been
I was trying to find some information to back up my story, but I can't find anything that does. So I'll describe what I experienced, and maybe someone will have an idea.
Around 1999, my father gave me the first computer that was "mine" (previous ones having been "family computers"). I was inexperienced and 15 years old, with access to filesharing platforms, and learned the hard way about *.jpg.exe files.
The hard drive started making rhythmic sounds as soon as the OS was booted. A couple days later, the OS wouldn't boot. A reinstall worked for a short time (but the drive still did its odd sound). We had some bootable disk scanning utilities from the drive vendor. They identified the drive as having 100% bad sectors.
I've always assumed that a virus was crashing or misaligning the read heads somehow. That was reinforced when the second drive that I got met the same fate. Although, I guess it's more likely that they were 2 drives from the same shipment that met early deaths due to manufacturing defects.
I have never heard of anything like the following, but here is a reasonable yet very much theoretical explanation for what you described:
This virus loaded itself somehow at early bootup (maybe even launched via an altered bootloader) and then sequentially accessed every single sector on the disk and deliberately marked it as bad at either the FAT32 or ATA (hardware) level.
The bustlework involved with actually issuing tons of such ATA commands could explain the thrashing.
(Just to be redundantly, obsessively clear, this parameter is several orders of magnitude more dangerous than "rm -rf --no-preserve-root", as hdparm will use ATA/SCSI commands that will be preserved by the hardware across infinite reboots until exactly the right --repair-sector command is issued.)
And FWIW, I do see a lot of holes in this (very simplistic) interpretation, and would be genuinely stunned if this is what actually happened.
1999, maybe 2000, with 6.4GB and 8.4GB drives (I suspect they were WDs, based on disk utility floppies I've got around from that era). It looks like the affected Deskstars were 15-75GB, and probably at least a year later, right?
I was trying to find some information to back up my story, but I can't find anything that does. So I'll describe what I experienced, and maybe someone will have an idea.
Around 1999, my father gave me the first computer that was "mine" (previous ones having been "family computers"). I was inexperienced and 15 years old, with access to filesharing platforms, and learned the hard way about *.jpg.exe files.
The hard drive started making rhythmic sounds as soon as the OS was booted. A couple days later, the OS wouldn't boot. A reinstall worked for a short time (but the drive still did its odd sound). We had some bootable disk scanning utilities from the drive vendor. They identified the drive as having 100% bad sectors.
I've always assumed that a virus was crashing or misaligning the read heads somehow. That was reinforced when the second drive that I got met the same fate. Although, I guess it's more likely that they were 2 drives from the same shipment that met early deaths due to manufacturing defects.