Hard drive killers

[gore]

OK this is starting to piss me off:

I'm looking up a few things right now since it's almost 7 AM and I'm pulling an all nighter to "change phases" and one thing I came across while reading on Wiki and a few other places was the Hard Drive Killer apps.

Now, I've heard of these before, and probably had a few copies back when I collected NetNastys a while back, but I didn't really use this stuff as I didn't have extra machines to check these out with at the time, so I have a few questions as googling seems to bring up basically nothing of interest:

1. How exactly does HDKP work? From what I've seen so far, it seems to just do what a secure erase would do, but in a different context... True? False? From what one person said in a thread I was looking at, it seems to perm - erase everything on a drive running certain Windows versions, which to me sounds like a quick as crap (I read it was 2 seconds) format on the drive itself and the MBR.

Is this the case?

2. I have a floppy disk that is basically all I have left of my collection...Which doesn't bother me because I had some REALLY nasty stuff and I quit drinking and computing INSTANTLY one night when I was moving some files to that floppy my friend hadn't zipped up....

You can imagine what happened when I went to put them on the floppy and accidentally double clicked on a .exe file and found the machine to be destroyed literally.

I have NO idea what this thing is to this day and now I'm starting to really wonder just what the hell it is.

The day I ran it on accident, this is what happened:

-The machine was running Windows 95 (My VERY first Computer ever, and when I got it, it was September of 1999, but I made do with it).

-I had Anti Virus and a Firewall installed.

-The machine was SLOW as crap and Windows 95 would take around 4 minutes to boot...

-This thing loaded MUCH faster

-When I noticed what I had accidentally double clicked on, my hand went for the power botton, but it was to late, what I saw as I was reaching for the power button was an MS-DOS prompt pop up on the screen and I do recall something about files being copied...

-I'm to big of a wuss to test it out because I STILL remember crying like a little girl when I turned the power back on and saw the machine asking for a system disk.. Windows was gone..

Now, the ODD part about all this is that I held onto that computer even though the next day I went and bought my HP which I still have to this day (Good God those are some fond memories) as I wanted to mess with it.

I opened it up and cleaned out the dust, took it outside to the garage and hooked it up, and decided what the hell I'll see if I can figure out what happened or if I can use it for Linux.

What I found out after that app ran:

- PC-DOS floppies still work after drawing on them

-A machine with a HD big enough for Windows 95 and God knows how many MP3s and videos and porn on it can all of a sudden say that you don't have enough space for Windows 3.1.... (I really don't understand this part, I got PC-DOS to install, and when I went to install Windows 3.1 on it and had tried wiping the drive, it said Windows 3.1 was to large for the drive...)

-Linux wouldn't install either... It seriously acted like the drive itself filled up and started killing itself off a gig at a time.

Has anyone heard of this ever? I tried quite a bit on this machine and never got anything other than PC-DOS to install, Linux and Windows wouldn't and the machine just kept saying it didn't have enough free space, yet I had wiped all of it.

I found this odd to say the least and ended up giving the MOBO to a friend's Dad and kept the RAM for decoration.

Anyway, if you've heard of what I was talking about, wtf is it? How does it do that to a machine that was working just fine? And so fast?

I still have the very floppy I was copying to that night... Needless to say I look at it sometimes, hold it in my hand, whisper sweet nothings... OK sorry, but you get the idea, I still wonder.

I currently have no machines running DOS or Windows 9X to look at it on, and I also don't have a small drive I could test it on as from what I saw it really hurt the HD.

Before I close:

I DO in fact understand just how hard it is to actually murder a drive with code... I know a hammer works better but I'm still stumped on this one.

And for people who don't think you can hurt hardware with software buy a machine from around 1997, install Linux or BSD on it, put it online, give me the IP and the root username and password and set up SSH. Once I get done "reconfiguring" your X.Org server WAY past what the monitor can handle and smoke starts flying you'll agree


Anyway, thanks all, and just a heads up our tech room is coming along now, the walls are black, and earlier we tested how to get the 0s and 1s up to make it look the best.

[moxquito]

It sounds like the drive was low level formated very quickly and incorrectly.. which doesn't make sense because I've always been under the impression that Low Level Formats take a long time.

Thats the only thing I could think of that would cause the drive to be recognized as a different size and not be able to install anything other than PC DOS

If you still have the drive (probably not)...
What does/did the BIOS recognize the size as?
Did you try to low level format the drive to see if it would recognize it correctly?

[morganlefay]

if you fill up the drive...there aint much you can do about it...

Its fooked

MLF

[stuart]

Have you run fisk on the hard drive to see if it is partitioned correctly? It sounds like the hard drive has a very small active partition on it.

Stuart

[treanglin]

if you fill up the drive...there aint much you can do about it...

Its fooked

MLF

yeah, but why was it getting filled up.

The idea of it being formatted incorrectly sounds likely, but then again I don't even know enough about how hard drives and formatting to make that call.

I remember at some point in the past after formatting and trying to re-install windows 98 getting a "not enough disk space" error. The **** was driving me nuts because I was just running the OS hours before and now i didn't have enough space?

Eventually my dad was able to figure it out, he told me what he did....but I forgot.

[gore]

I still have the floppy but I don't think uploading the file is a good idea, or responsible of me, but it was VERY odd that after fdisk it said it was still full.... Formatting usually works on every drive. It's like it had physically damaged the drive which is what I found to be strange.

[AngelicKnight]

And for people who don't think you can hurt hardware with software buy a machine from around 1997, install Linux or BSD on it, put it online, give me the IP and the root username and password and set up SSH. Once I get done "reconfiguring" your X.Org server WAY past what the monitor can handle and smoke starts flying you'll agree

gore, if I had a monitor I wouldn't mind blowing, I'd so take you up on that. I've heard of things like this before but always wondered if it was actually myth or not.

Can you offer any sort of enlightenment as to how in the world that's done? Does it force some device into overheating?

[treanglin]

I've heard of ppl physically destroying monitors with inccorrect configuration but hard disk? How does that work? How do you fux up a hard drive w/ software...I don't get it.

[morganlefay]

Well...some of the older harddrives were pretty small...wouldnt take much to fill up...command on a floppy... copy C:\windows\*.* C:\ could do it

cause in the old days EVERYTHING was stored in there

MLF

[t34b4g5]

Oh the memory's.
the full name of the app is Hard Drive Killer Pro. It was a very very destructive trojan back in the day.

it had more then one use. I should still have a mirror of the original site with all the info.

I'll find what i can Gore and i'll send you a pm when done..