Hard drive freeze worked

[geekgrandma]

Hello.
Just wanted to say, I thought it was crazy but I put a failed hard drive in the freezer for 2 hours, slaved it up and retrieved the data. This drive, when slaved before freezing, registered as a 0mb drive in the bios in 3 different pc's. Furthermore, none of the pc's it was slaved in would even boot. Has anybody else ever done this? It's cool.
Have a good night.
Lav

[zybch]

Always stick the drive in a zip lock bag of course.
I've used it on several occasions. What seems to happen is that the various parts of the drive shrink a bit (and by different ammounts) and sometimes this is just enough to get stuff working again, just enough to get your data off the drive.
Slamming the drive bottom first against a flat tabletop sometimes works as well.
There is a util called Spinrite which kind of simulates this. It will keep trying to read faulty sectors and stuff by moving the read/write heads to different parts of the disk then whizzing them back to the nad sector in question. Because its whizzing back from different areas, the heads end up in a slightly different place each time which increases the chance that something useable can be read.
www.grc.com is the site of Steve Gibson who wrote Spinrite, plus a heap of other well programmed, tiny and very useful security utils.

If that doesn't work, the old rubber mallet and a warranty job are the only options left

[Ol'Tunzafun]

I have used this method twice with drives that would boot but flaked out as soon as they warmed up to the point where the BIOS did not recognize them. By placing a cold gel pack on top of the drive I was able to keep one of them up and running long enough to ghost it. I didn't know how much time I would have so I quickly grabbed the document folders before pressing on with the image.
One was chilled in a freezer and the other in a snow bank but, in both cases, they were double sealed with freezer bags.
It works a treat for some drive problems. This is not an urban myth.

[rangeral]

I've been recommending this for years on both forums I do, its usually the circuit board components that are damaged so when they heat up drive stops talking to the machine which is where the freezing comes in. Most people don't have an identical drive to swap circuit boards with so freezing is your next best shot.

Glad it worked for you.

[Comage]

I once had a Creative TNT which used some stubborn epoxy with a passive heatsink. I couldn't remove it, so I popped it in the freezer after hearing somebody mention about it being easier just after taking it out from the fridge.

I took it out after 15 mins, and tried to pop the heatsink off with a screwdriver.

Cracked the GPU, and my TNT went . It was sad, coz I had just bought it in 1998 (?) when it first came out.

PS: This is OT.

[mireland]

holy cow..never heard of this in all my years as a techie....

[Comage]

Well, here it is:

Look for the keyword "freezer trick"

http://www.virtual-hideout.net/artic...ling/print.htm

[maximus02143]

I use BartPE it boots off the cd and you can access data from the drive and move it to a share.
http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/

[Ol'Tunzafun]

I use BartPE it boots off the cd and you can access data from the drive and move it to a share.

BartPE is an excellent alternative to slaving a harddrive into another machine, but it can't read a disk that the BIOS does not even recognize. You would still have to freeze the drive to access the data.
Nevertheless, BartPE should be in everyone's toolbox.

[crossedup]

http://ubcd4win.com/

That one is based on BartPE and already has a bunch of plugins. Should be in the toolbox as well or instead, either way

[G Ray88]

The freezer trick will work I have used it a few times, and I was able to recover the information off the HD's. All though the first time I read about it I thought it was a joke. Good Luck