[ale] OT could a metal detector in shipping process do this?

[David Tomaschik]

On Fri, Jan 27, 2012 at 3:01 PM, Wolf Halton <wolf.halton at gmail.com> wrote:
> I have 4 hard drives sent to me. One of the 4 is entirely unformatted while
> the other three are formatted  (and full of data).
> Is there any way that a metal detector or some-such DHS TSA device could
> entirely clear 1 of 4 discs??
>
> The sender said there was data on all the disks when they were packaged up.

For one, the screening of packages doesn't involve any metal
detectors: after all, many packages contain metal, ranging from hard
drives to cell phones to gift boxes of chocolate!  So while a
sufficiently strong magnetic field could mess with hard drives, and a
metal detector is unlikely to produce such a field, that's not likely
to be the issue here.

Packages *may* be X-rayed during shipping, but that should have little
to no effect on magnetic drives.  (After all, every laptop boarding an
airplane is x-rayed.)

Not sure what would make a drive appear unformatted unless it wasn't
formatted when it was shipped.


-- 
David Tomaschik
OpenPGP: 0x5DEA789B
http://systemoverlord.com
david at systemoverlord.com