7 ms·

The only times I've heard of destroying hardware with software have been: 1) stopping the ray in a CRT monitor through special purpose registers and using it t

by perbu 9y ago

The only times I've heard of destroying hardware with software have been: 1) stopping the ray in a CRT monitor through special purpose registers and using it to burn through the phosphorous. 2) Early floppy drives where you could position the head to an impossible position causing the servo to burn. Haven't heard of anything like what he is describing the last 20 years. Perhaps you can overheat some stuff - but most likley it'll shut down before anything bad happends. There are however some worrying notes on OSDEV about causing potential damage when probing for memory, perhaps the author read this and got worries. It isn't detailed or likely, imho.

colejohnson66 9y ago
On computers where `efivars' is mounted read-write, you can possibly brick your UEFI by deleting the contents of that “file system” https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/2402 https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/2402
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
ihale 9y ago
I've always been told that there is risk of irreversible hardware damage. I haven't any idea where this claim comes from, and I've never been offered an explanation. It's one of the things that has always made me wonder, and why I've never tested any of my own code on real hardware. I'd be curious to see this claim expanded, or debased.
amiga-workbench 9y ago
On the Commodore PET you could write a short BASIC program to rapidly change the direction of the tape drive motor, it would fry the transformer that ran it.
- amyjess 9y ago
  I had a coworker who used to be a C64 enthusiast. One day, a very long time ago, he discovered a C64 program on Usenet called "drive music". He downloaded it and ran it... and his floppy drive started playing music. After playing with it for a while, he heard that using it too much could throw your drive heads out of alignment, so he got rid of it.
  - jerrysievert 9y ago
    For me, alignment problems on the 1541 were fairly common (there was a lot of head thrashing when trying to read "protected" disks), which ended up with the 1541 cover being easily removable for me, and always a screwdriver nearby to recalibrate.
wolverine876 9y ago
Tangent, but a good story: Early in my career, in the CRT era, I was working late at a client's office. One of the executives stopped by to chat; he was telling me that his house burned down the past weekend (!) due to a wiring fault in an SUV in the attached garage that somehow ignited something ... whatever caused it, holy shit. His family all got out ok - in the middle of the night - but everything they owned was lost. As we were walking through the darkened office on our way out - the last two to leave - he said, 'do you smell something burning?' Poor guy; he must smell it everywhere. For all I know there was still smoke residue in his sinuses. Anyway, I have to humor him - I'm tired and really want to get home, but there's no question of trying to talk sense to someone in his state. So I make a show of looking around the office with him - and sure enough, there was a CRT monitor, plugged in, off (or maybe asleep), and literally smoking. I never saw anything like it before or since, in over 20 years in IT. But he must still smells smoke everywhere he goes.
khedoros1 9y ago
> 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.
- BearOso 9y ago
  Given the year, that sounds suspiciously like the IBM 75gxp Deathstar fiasco. It probably wasn’t your fault at all.
  - ChickeNES 9y ago
    Was about to say the same when I refreshed and saw your comment. For GP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deskstar#IBM_Deskstar_75GXP_failures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deskstar#IBM_Deskstar_75GXP_fa...
  - khedoros1 9y ago
    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?
- exikyut 9y ago
  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. Ref/inspiration for this theory: ^F for "--make-bad-sector" in https://linux.die.net/man/8/hdparm https://linux.die.net/man/8/hdparm (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.

by perbu 9y ago

colejohnson66 9y ago

On computers where `efivars' is mounted read-write, you can possibly brick your UEFI by deleting the contents of that “file system” https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/2402 https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/2402

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

ihale 9y ago

I've always been told that there is risk of irreversible hardware damage. I haven't any idea where this claim comes from, and I've never been offered an explanation. It's one of the things that has always made me wonder, and why I've never tested any of my own code on real hardware. I'd be curious to see this claim expanded, or debased.

amiga-workbench 9y ago

On the Commodore PET you could write a short BASIC program to rapidly change the direction of the tape drive motor, it would fry the transformer that ran it.

amyjess 9y ago
I had a coworker who used to be a C64 enthusiast. One day, a very long time ago, he discovered a C64 program on Usenet called "drive music". He downloaded it and ran it... and his floppy drive started playing music. After playing with it for a while, he heard that using it too much could throw your drive heads out of alignment, so he got rid of it.
- jerrysievert 9y ago
  For me, alignment problems on the 1541 were fairly common (there was a lot of head thrashing when trying to read "protected" disks), which ended up with the 1541 cover being easily removable for me, and always a screwdriver nearby to recalibrate.

wolverine876 9y ago

Tangent, but a good story: Early in my career, in the CRT era, I was working late at a client's office. One of the executives stopped by to chat; he was telling me that his house burned down the past weekend (!) due to a wiring fault in an SUV in the attached garage that somehow ignited something ... whatever caused it, holy shit. His family all got out ok - in the middle of the night - but everything they owned was lost. As we were walking through the darkened office on our way out - the last two to leave - he said, 'do you smell something burning?' Poor guy; he must smell it everywhere. For all I know there was still smoke residue in his sinuses. Anyway, I have to humor him - I'm tired and really want to get home, but there's no question of trying to talk sense to someone in his state. So I make a show of looking around the office with him - and sure enough, there was a CRT monitor, plugged in, off (or maybe asleep), and literally smoking. I never saw anything like it before or since, in over 20 years in IT. But he must still smells smoke everywhere he goes.

khedoros1 9y ago

> 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.

BearOso 9y ago
Given the year, that sounds suspiciously like the IBM 75gxp Deathstar fiasco. It probably wasn’t your fault at all.
- ChickeNES 9y ago
  Was about to say the same when I refreshed and saw your comment. For GP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deskstar#IBM_Deskstar_75GXP_failures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deskstar#IBM_Deskstar_75GXP_fa...
- khedoros1 9y ago
  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?
exikyut 9y ago
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. Ref/inspiration for this theory: ^F for "--make-bad-sector" in https://linux.die.net/man/8/hdparm https://linux.die.net/man/8/hdparm (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.