I think what they were talking about is dividing what was on the hard drive onto a floppy or another hard drive for safe keeping...
You know as well as I do, you don’t ‘break’ a hard drive in two and then glue it together again....
Possibly backed up to floppies.
True, you can't crack a hard drive platter in two, then glue it back together, but for a long time now a hard drive consisted of multiple platters stacked on top of one another with read/write heads on the top and bottom of each platter.
I read that portion that they cracked open the case, then each person took a platter.
Backing up to floppies and one taking half the stack and the other taking the remaining stack makes more sense.
Thanks.