Back in the mists of prehistory, before the CD-R, men and women used “Zip disks” for large backups and file transfers. These were 100-MB super-floppies that had access speed similar to hard drives.
The drives for these disks had a failure mode called the ‘Click of Death’, after the clicking noise a failed drive would make. Apparently the drive mechanism failed so that the head went too close to the central spindle of the disk. This failure would damage the disk. The damaged drive would so damage any new Zip disk that was insrted in it.
When a damaged disk was inserted into an undamaged Zip drive, that drive would try to read the damaged disk, would itself be damaged, and would exhibit the Click of Death as well. This newly-damaged drive would then go on to damage more disks.
Could this behaviour be considered an actual hardware-based virus?
Insofar as the “click” was caused by corrupt data on the zipdisk, which caused the read/write head to seek to a place that damaged the seeking motor and gears and etc, you could say it was software. Corrupt data fed to hardware that destroyed the hardware. Data is inherently soft, I think - unless you cast it into hard form in a ROM or such. I don’t know. It might be a matter of opinion.
Are viruses that write themselves into your computer’s BIOS eeprom chip hardware or software?
-Ben
A couple years ago I put together a data acquisition system at work. It had been reliable up until last week, when the hard drive began “clicking.”
The hard drive was non-responsive. I had a lot of data on it, so in an act of desperation I stuck the hard drive in a freezer for 24 hours. It didn’t help.
Moral of the story: Back up your data. In my case, I should have implemented a RAID system or something…
Go to http://grc.com and look for Click of Death. The guy has software that can retrieve “lost” data from the disks.
Unfortunately (for me) you must have FAT partitions and I’m strictly and NTFS guy. He claims one day he’ll get around to an NTFS version but I’m not holding my breath.
Lots of other interesting info on the site; worth some of your time.
Gee, and I always thought the Click of Death was directly attributable to the guys and gals at Iomega being incompetent hacks instead of a virus. Well, more than one way to look at things, I guess…
As far as I know, this was just a simple fault in a certain batch of Iomega ZIP drives. I have never heard of it migrating from one drive to another, and I used to work at a newspaper with a substantial art department that used ZIP disks all the time. We had some click of death events, but they basically meant the drive was wrecked, not the disk (necessarily).
Yes, there was class action lawsuit. I think all of us Zip drive owners got a coupon for some token amount of money towards the purchase of additional products from Iomega.
Never understood the “click of death,” but it seems there were so many angry users that it must have been real for some. I never had a single problem with my SCSI Zip drive. I used it with two Macs and two PC laptops (with SCSI PCMCIA card) and I moved it around and bumped it a lot. It was in high, high use, since hard drives were small back then – I think 250MB on the first Mac and maybe up to 2GB on the most recent of those laptops. A 100MB “floppy” was a lot then. But when I got my first Yamaha SCSI CD-Burner (4x burning!) the Zip was sold on eBay, and I never heard complaints from the purchaser.
Yesterday I got an offer in the mail to extend the warranty on my laptop. That evening, the HD died by click death. Coincidence !? :tinfoilhat:
OK, it was a coincidence.
But what should I do? I’m inclined to buy a new HD and install it, then connect the bad HD to my desktop and try running some recovery tools. Can anyone data recovery tools (preferably free) or procedures? Should I pay a ridiculous price to extend the warranty ($170 for one year) and then make HP fix my laptop?
While I am loath to dispute anybody over something relatively minor, Steve Gibson is pretty much a fraud. He claims to be a “security expert”, yet never shows up at any security conferences, because he’d get nailed by the people that actually know their stuff. Similarly, SpinRite is a bunch of trash. I suggest the following link (granted, the domain name does not exactly imply a lack of bias, but it does not reflect well on Gibson under any circumstances).