Could this happen?

[BigJay]

Dunno if this qualifies as highly technical... but can't hurt to try....


In one of my classes the other day, another student was talking about a virus that can "permanently damange" a hard drive. He said all the data on a hard drive is written starting from a certain point and that point is given an offset value. He said the virus could change the offset value and render the hard drive completely unusable (except after a low level format). Anyone know if this is possible? My teacher seemed kinda skeptical and I agreed with my teacher but the guy insists he has 5 hard drives at home that have suffered this fate. I kinda think he's doin somethin else wrong... but I could be wrong. Searches on google for virus and offset just talk about how if you want to write a virus that infects a file without overwriting it, you have to make sure the file starts at the same offset value but as best as I can tell... offset values are measured from the start of the sector. He said they were measure from a point that was determined the first time you format and it cannot be changed with a regular format. Any ideas if this is true or how wrong he is??? Thanks in advance!!!

---Jason

 

[Cogman]

This IS possible, the Hard drive would be redered usless if the boot sector of said drive is damage/destroyed. However this only works if the drive is the master drive, if not nothing will really happen. A low level format is not required to fix the problem I believe (but would be a few years ago)

 

[BigJay]

that's kinda what i figured... i was more in doubt of his theory about the offset being a set thing after your first format that can only be changed by a low level format. Thanks for the reply... if anyone else has more insight into this type of stuff (hard drive offsets, virii, etc) that'd be very helpful. Thanks!


--jason

 

[Mark R]

If the boot sector on a drive is corrupted, or overwritten, then a simple reformat will fix it.

You can't damage a hard drive via software (unless you try something like uploading a new firmware). All the complicated controls are done by the on-board processor, and it will ensure that the drive can't disable itself. Stuff like 'low-level formatting' doesn't actually do anything to the drive, it just deletes the contents of the boot-sector and the contents of the rest of the drive. It doesn't 'format' the drive in the same way that you format a floppy or a CDRW - the hardware simply isn't there.

Old hard-drives (before IDE was invented) were controlled by the OS on the computer together with a proprietary controller chip. This included motor speed control, formatting (real formatting), head seeks, etc. It was certainly possible for a virus to wipe a drive by low-level formatting a different format (although you could just LLF it back again), or actually damage a drive by overspeeding the motor, or hitting the heads repeatedly against their stops.