Freeze a dead hard drive to copy its data

Nov 03, '06 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: Doc Swift

My wife carries a portable 40 GB 2.5" drive back and forth to work, and has on it all her professional and personal files (30 GB); in other words her digital life. It has worked fine for the past 4 years, and she treats it carefully. However, without warning and without reason, it simply would not mount yesterday. I tried everything; I could hear the drive spinning and feel it running, but it would not mount so no utility could touch it. It was obviously some kind of mechanical problem. I removed it and installed it into another working case, but that didn't help. I guessed it was the end of her data on that drive, and the only backup was months old.

And the solution? Putting the drive in the freezer!

I enclosed the naked drive in a plastic bag to keep out moisture and froze it overnight. Then in the morning I let it warm up for several hours and plugged it in. I let it run for about an hour to get it warm again (like drives normally get when running; remember the drive would spin but not mount). And it mounted, and ran fine! And I was able to copy all 30 GB of data to a new drive. The theory being that the freezing caused parts to contract and the rewarming caused them to re-expand and this release the stuck parts (probably the read/write arms).

[kirkmc adds: This hint follows another hint about cooling an iPod to get it to work that was published a few days ago. Several people mentioned similar techniques in the comments to the previous hint: either putting a drive in the freezer, refrigerator, or simply on a cool-pack. While this sounds like hard-drive voodoo, I'd certainly try anything if I was in that situation.]

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