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New Airport Security Erases Disks!

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Hi, please feel free to crosspost this as necessary as it's pretty interesting stuff and rather a change to previous advice.

I'm assuming that anyone travelling with valuable MD recordings would keep them in their hand baggage - right? Well, a friend of mine didn't and found that his 11 field recordings had been erased when he got home. He was puzzled as to what had happened and since we knew that discs must be heated before x-rays can have any effect on them, he couldn't fathom how this had happened. Ringing the airport, however, he discovered that hold baggage went through a heat exchanger in order to melt the cellophane security wrapper onto the bag, and that this machine was located right next to the big nasty x-ray machine.

If you plan to travel ANYWHERE that is using this process then use your common sense and carry those irreplaceable recordings safe in your hand baggage!

DJ

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Ringing the airport, however, he discovered that hold baggage went through a heat exchanger in order to melt the cellophane security wrapper onto the bag, and that this machine was located right next to the big nasty x-ray machine.

What is a cellophane security wrapper?

According to various FAQs, the heat required to make the recording layer on MiniDisc susceptible to a weak magnetic field is 180 degrees celsius (maybe this varies with Hi-MD, but I doubt it). This sounds highly entertaining but I'm personally doubting it...

Edited by tekdroid
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Yep, I agree that you would need to heat the disc surface upto over 100C to change the data with a small magnet. Heating luggage to this temp would cause all sorts of problems so it is very unlikely that this will cause a disc to be erased.

Magnetic fields can cause errors on MD's but the last time I saw anything on the net about this it needed a rare earth magnet on the outside of the disc case or a speaker magnet placed directly onto the disc surface. Both of these fields would be dangerous to work in for extended periods of time when done over a large area so thats also unlikely.

More than likely it could be the old broken magnetic recording wire in the MD device that erases a non-write protected disc on access.

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Maybe the possiblity of Static electricity generated by the shrink wrap ( that stuff generates a LOT ) in combination with several other factors (X-Ray, Magnetic feild of the metal detector , and screening inside the machine)

So his data isnt erased .......ITS MUTATED AAHHHHHHGGGGGGG , EVERYBODY RUN The MD GAMMACRON IS ON THE LOOSE!!!!!

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