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Freeze a dead hard drive to copy its data
Authored by: johnsawyercjs on Nov 07, '06 06:41:09PM

I can vouch for heat sometimes being the fix--I use a toaster oven set to a low temperature (it doesn't have to get too hot to help, and you don't want it to get too hot anyway, which might melt some plastic inside the drive). I've been recovering data from bad drives since hard drives first became available for the Mac, and depending on the way the drive is behaving, I'll either first freeze it or heat it. I haven't tried running a drive while it's still in the freezer, but maybe I'll try it the next time I have a drive that might qualify. What I've been doing to keep a drive cool, has been to put a couple wet sponges into the freezer too, and place the drive on top of one of them (metal topside down) while it's on the workbench, and when the sponge starts to warm up, I replace it with the other sponge that's still in the freezer, and keep doing this until the data is recovered. To keep a hard drive warm, sometimes I run a hair dryer over it while the recovery is proceeding.



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Freeze a dead hard drive to copy its data
Authored by: johnsawyercjs on Nov 07, '06 06:54:21PM

I should add: don't get the hair dryer too close to the drive, since the EMF from the hair dryer might interfere with the drive's electronics.

If one cycle of cooling and/or heating doesn't allow the drive to run long enough to recover its files, try several more cooling and/or heating cycles, letting it rest for a while, etc.--if you keep at it, sometimes a bad drive revives just long enough to let you copy the crucial files--grab them first. Sometimes after a cooling and/or heating process, if you just let the drive sit at room temperature for a while (several hours or overnight tends to be best, in my experience anyway), the drive sometimes revives just long enough to allow you to copy the files. Sometimes it runs just one more time after a round of cooling/heating, and never again no matter what you do, so have your backup drive running at the same time, ready to receive the files!



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