Absolutely.
One answer tells of a virus that took over the floppy drive,
causing it to "read" a floppy as fast as the motor would
move the head back and forth. It is possible to tell the
motor to drive the head BEYOND its limits, slamming it
into the case, miss-aligning and burning out the motor.
You can do the same thing with the CD head drive - moving it beyond its limits, faster than needed, repeatedly, and burning
out the motors.
You can, if you know the harddrive, do the same thing, telling
the heads to read or write repeatedly, as a fast as they can,
and burn out the head motor, or have the heads repeatedly
land at some spot infinitely, until a head crash occurs.
Your monitor DISPLY, ADVANCED, allows you to choose
settings of resolutions and frequencies which often exceed the actual monitor's capabilities, overdriving the high voltage windings, and if left for more than a few seconds
as in the standard windows settings, would cause the monitor
to go dead. If this were put into a screen saver ( no one is around to see it ) then it would overdrive your monitor until it smoked the high voltage transformer, or the
horizontal and vertical transistors.
If you know what drives, what monitor, what operating system, etc. a computer is set up with, you can specifically target the hardware itself, and destroy the hardware.
Many websites check out your entire computer online, and will give you a list of what software you have, what CPU, ram,
harddrives, printers, scanners, etc., you have installed.
Microsoft "UPDATE" is typicaly of this, and many " GAME " sites make a thorough inventory of everything on your computer on a routine basis. Once this specific information is known, an expert in hardware code can do anything with the actual hardware. Any LINUX hardware driver guru " HAS " to be able to go into the machine drivers, and run harddrives, printers, monitors, and write the code from scratch, so that incorporating machine codes that ram the heads, or over-cycle components, is child's play.
Early Floppy anti-copy routines often used floppy hardware
drivers that ignored DOS drivers, and moved the heads of the
floppy beyond the limits of where DOS would normally write
tracks. When someone tried to copy the floppy in DOS, the
tracks beyond DOS's limits would be missing. This "generally" worked, but there were floppys made that would not do this, and even now, in CD burning software, you can
set the limits to " OVERBURN", moving the machine lasers
further than the normal CD limits. If you do so, most software will warn you that you may damage your CD burner,
and only " CERTAIN" CD burners are capable, and even then
only to certain limits. Getting a virus to drive the CD heads beyond the normal track area would slam the laser motors against the case, and if done repeatedly, would
miss align and burn out the motors....
But you should be aware that many harddrives and peripherals have built in safeguards, and "DOS" and such platforms usually have standard drivers that deliberately limit self-damaging routines. Only a very experienced hardware expert would be able to make the virus code
over-drive a device, and in many instances he would have to know the SPECIFIC make model and manufacture of the device to have it work effectively.
I know of a couple of routines that will destroy such things as a specific harddrive, or floppy...
Such things are somewhat rare though, so so't panic. !