Before throwing away an old laptop, I had it do that to itself. Well, more specifically I used shred, which doesn't just mark files as 'deleted', but also actively overwrites the bytes on disk.

I started it from a TTY, so that there was no GUI that could want to load files from disk and then potentially crash the whole operation. But yeah, it just went through like normal and I ended up back on my shell (which makes sense, the shell should be in RAM).
It was only when I ran exit to close that shell, that the system showed it was irreparably broken.

I did then also take out the hard drive to whack it with a hammer, just to be sure. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯