If the magnetic fields in those airport baggage scanners can't upset the electronics then I doubt that a simple magnet that someone would be carrying on their person would do it. Must've been a coincidence. Good luck and hope you fix the problem w/o undue stress.
I thought if a magnet is powerfull enough it can wipe flash memory too. Could be wrong.
This is from a photography website:
"The information on flash media will not be erased and the card will not become damaged by electricity or magnets, unless the voltage or magnetic field is exceptionally high or strong."
Most of the time, a magnet shouldn't have an effect on digital media
but, who knows for sure?
If a powerful magnet stuck to the gal's purse, lot of data in
there. Are *.jpg images of the purse available? Are backups of
the data available? Sprite saved my buns many times!
Perhaps you should post some *.jpg images for the geeks to look
at. Could be as worthwhile as Sprite Backup is! :hide:
if the magnet was big enough maybe it pulled the battery contacts off so your PDA isnt recieveing power from the battery....
as far as strong magnetic field stuff.... even with micro drives and such, handheld magnets will almost certainly NOT be strong enough to wipe any data, they need to be more like elctro-magnets to do damage to HD's (at least desktop and laptop drives, not sure about micro-drives tho but the way HD's work is they use electo-magnets, which are more powerful then the normal everyday kind, to store and erase data)
and PDA's have quite a bit of metal in them, CPU, memory, all the wires connecting to the various parts etc... o ya STYLUS lol on most pda's its all metal lol....
but if your data is on the CF/SD card then remove the card and do a hard reset (if you cant get it to work with a soft reset and the battery is making contact, and of course dont have too much data thats not replaceable)
The magnet HAS TO BE BIG AND STRONG....which many of use don't usually have or carry with us. You need to create a electro-magnetic field to erase the data. Like one of those industrial Gauss hard drive eraser device.
Magnets could magnetize and stick switches/contacts to a certain position.
Personally, I'd find out who that joker was and have him buying me a new Axim and sue him for lost information and downtime. He might not think it's that funny, and stop him from being a nuisance in public.
I have a magnet pulled from a hard drive that will lift 40 pounds without even budging. Very hard to get it off any metal surface. Had to use a crowbar to release it off the kitched sink (porcelain/steel). Dad laughed when i asked if he could get that off there. Then he laughed harder barely being able to drink his coffee as I used a prybar to lift it off.
It is now firmly attached to the front of a refrigerator where it hasnt moved in six years.
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I think we are all forgetting about Earth Magnets. These are the Small little magnets that are hand held and are very strong.
you can attach it to a metal beam and hold your self by them.
They are also used by theives to run over the EAS security tags on products in stores to disable the beep when you leave.
It does this by pulling 2 peices of metal together through a plastic insulator. now if it can do that it certanly could cause damge to a pda. however it is not going to be to the circuit board.
It will be to something small and metal. Battery clip, part of a switch, ribbon cable pulled and now miss aligned. all fixable but i would return to dell if still under warrenty.
If it is not under warrenty contact me and i will attempt to fix it for you for the cost of Shipping it back to you when it is done.
High-force magnet could do it. Remember, moving a magnetic field through a conductor will induce a current in said conductor.Faraday's Law of Induction. Also, of course, this could wipe your credit cards, id cards, anything with magnetic memory in it.
So, he thought it was funny, eh? The guy deserves a sturdy kick to the throat.
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Originally Posted by PocketBrain
High-force magnet could do it. Remember, moving a magnetic field through a conductor will induce a current in said conductor.
Ok, that is certainly true, however I'm pretty confident that in order to do damage to a device like this, we'd be talking about a field strength close to what is produced by (at least a small) A-bomb. Yes, I know about neodymium and rare-earth magnets, but even if there was a hand-held version strong enough to do damage (may I stress how unlikely this is?), there is NO WAY someone would be able to remove it.
Maybe a magnet could have pulled switch/battery contacts out of alignment, but that also seems a stretch. Not only are these things very small (the correlation between mass and magnetic attraction is positive), but they also tend to be made of alloys. Just look at the battery connectors; do they look like pure iron to you?
In short, I, for one, am certainly voting the "coincidence ticket".
I know that our media is safe from magnets. My PDA and SD card found its way over the magnet our video library uses to totally destroy information on diskettes and tape. My PDA was fine. Nothing changed. This magnet most definitely will take out all information on a tape or a floppy disk.
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“Everything is simpler than you think and yet more complex than you imagine.”
There's nothing affected my magnetism at all in a PDA like an Axim. The only thing in there that a magnet would even be able to stick to is the backing of the screen and some of the EM shielding. Everything else is plastic, copper, fiberglass, tin, or gold. Virtually nothing in any sort of electronic device is ferrous anymore. Iron and steel rust readily, and moving parts will do so eventually even when coated. Metals with an electric current being run through them like electrical contacts will corrode much more readily, as well. Contacts in cheap switches are made of tin, sometimes plated with a hair or gold. Your battery contacts are the same. Your front buttons, battery door switch, and card contacts are nonferrous as well. The circuit traces on your boards are made of gold, as are the miniscule wires inside your chips. The chips' pins are made of tin, all the solder is tin and lead, and all the guts of the chips are nonferrous, nonmagnetic ceramics and semimetals.
I used to keep a NiB (rare earth) hard drive magnet stuck to the back of my Audiovox Maestro so I could stick the PDA to things. The Maestro had a steel frame around the screen, so it worked well. Never damaged the thing one bit.
You would need a magnetic field of a couple thousand Tesla to do anything to nonferrous electronics. You didn't stick the thing in an MRI or stand on the sidelines watching a nuclear explosion recently, did you?
Otherwise, I'd say it was something unrelated to the magnetism that killed your PDA. Now, if your machine wasn't in a case (or not in a good one) the magnet could have very well stuck itself to your screen with enough force to break it, but in that case you'd probably notice screen damage before you ever went to turn the thing on.
Make sure your battery is in there right, your battery switch is in the right position, your battery door isn't damaged - It has a little leg that engages a microswitch so your Axim knows the door is installed - Check your charge, and poke your soft reset button.
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