Freezer Trick

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Hi Guys,

Just thought I'd inform you of a test I'm doing... Most of you will have heard about it, but I bet few people have tried it (if any!).

As I have nothing to lose and I am fully aware of what I am doing, here are the following things I've used to conduct this experiment:

1x cold freezer
1x broken 200GB Maxtor
1x airtight juice jug
1x pack of silica gel (this was my genius addition)

Step 1.
Get broken hard drive and throw it with a considerable amount of force into the juice jug. (Please note the force used to throw the HD inside the jug may possibly fix your harddrive... take it out and test before you freeze!)

Step 2.
Throw in the silica gel pack with the same amount of force as you threw the HD in, but aim it at the hard drive. (Again, if you managed to hit it.. this may have fixed it... take out and test again)

Step 3.
Put air-tight container lid on the juice jug and place in freezer gently and leave for 4-5 hours or until drive is completely frozen.

....

This is the stage I am currently up to.. but I will be back later to update the post with results!

-daz

ps. I am not advising anybody to use this method, nor will i take responsibility of anything should anybody have tried it. I am simply documenting my testing

 

winner isnt it.. i have some files which i would like to get off there, but no biggie if i can't

hoping to knock it out of park

 

Ive done this myself aswell with no problems either, i just wrapped my drive in a towel then once it was cold i managed to get my data off the drive.

 

Did the same thing two times. One time it worked, the other didn't. It's mostly pot luck but it seems to work more times than not. It's also usually a last ditch effort when nothing else works.

 

Never heard this one before!!

so if i have a problem HDD and all else fails, stick it in the freezer?

I wonder who was the first man to give this ago and what he was thinking!

 

Yep, putting it in the freezer can help.

However... this is a recipe for failure. You can absolutely damage the platters and the R/W heads by doing this.

 

I'm sure we've had this dicussion on here before at some point...

I've had it work for me in the past. I think it's something to do with the principle of heat=expand, cold=contract. If the read/write head is stuck, freezing it might change the dimensions enough to jog it loose. It doesn't always work, and even when it does it usually only works for a few minutes - which is often enough to grab loads of data you don't need, before it punks out again for good three sectors before your desperately needed data is recovered

 

True, you want it to be loose instead of seized up. But giving it a good knock is certainly a last-ditch effort, as it can do more harm than good. I'd only resort to that if it's still seized up after a good freeze.

 

Freezing worked on one disk of mine as well once... kept running for a few hours, enough time to backup some data. Then it kicked the bucket again...

 

you mean people keep data on just one disk?
seems like a recipe for disaster if you ask me

'lets put our important **** on this one shiney fragile spinny thing and then rotate it half a million times a minute and cross our fingers'

hehe ;)

 

I tried to convince my Mum to let me install an openfiler SAN for her but she didn't want the machine running 24/7. I'm only half joking there as well!

 

It's important to back up all those recipes.

 

My mum? Recipes?

Pah - the woman knows how to prepare three dishes:

Albondigas (meatballs)
Gambas al Ajillo (prawns in garlic sauce)
Paella (rice and whatever is left in the fridge/vegetable rack)

Recipes? She don need no steenkin recipes!

 

you ate well as a kid though, judging by your avatar.