Freezing Hard Drives

kevodaly

I've read about freezing a hard drive for a while to get it readable long enough to copy some data from it ?

Anyone tried it ?

It's a laptop hard drive - its in a usb caddy. When I plug it in there's a slight click ( as if its trying to spin ) and the fan is working ( so it's getting power )

Would the freezer trick be worth a shot ?

layke

The click means your needle is mafuctioning and instead of resting on the platter it's totally off. Well that[s usually what it means.

I've never heard of freezing a HDD, but i'm fairly certain if you were to freeze it you'd need to use something a little better then your home fridge. Especially as Ice is made of water a non conductive liquid would be needed no?

Tbh the only thing I can think why you'd freeze it would be if it's overheating.

petes

layke wrote:

The click means your needle is mafuctioning and instead of resting on the platter it's totally off. Well that[s usually what it means.

I've never heard of freezing a HDD, but i'm fairly certain if you were to freeze it you'd need to use something a little better then your home fridge. Especially as Ice is made of water a non conductive liquid would be needed no?

Tbh the only thing I can think why you'd freeze it would be if it's overheating.

Do a quick google on freezing a hard drive. Plenty of info out there on it.

Cuddlesworth

You can do 2 things.

Place the hard-drive on its side and try it.

Get the Knoppix cd and try to recover files off it.


Then either smash it up, sell it or send it off to be repaired(500-2k)

Ruu_Old

Its meant to cool down the drive, if the problem is heat related and to give you time to copy some data off it when its cool. I have heard of it, very common solution but never tried it yet.

kevodaly

Well I googled it before I posted here - thats where I read about it.

I was just hoping someone closer to home might've tried it. I'll give it a go anyway

deckie27

try giving it a sharp slap. this may fix the needle. well it did for me before
I whacked the side of it with the handle of a screwdriver.
was able to get all my data off it no problems

Khannie

A lad on unreal.ie had some success with this (freezing). Have a search through the forums there.

petes

kevodaly wrote:

Well I googled it before I posted here - thats where I read about it.

I was just hoping someone closer to home might've tried it. I'll give it a go anyway

Make sure to put it in a sealed bag before chucking it in the freezer.

Stepherunie

I know one guy who did it - worked too - it kept stopping before he finished gettng stuff off - he put it in the freezer for half an hour and it worked fine.

SouperComputer

it works somtimes alright, but if the data is anyway important its a big risk.

Alun

As it happens I tried this just yesterday on a 40GB Hitachi TravelStor laptop drive that was spinning OK, but making recalibrate noises constantly, and not even being recognised by the laptop's BIOS.

I had managed to get most of the important data off it beforehand by connecting it up via a USB adapter and OnTrack EasyRecovery Pro, so thought I'd try the freezing trick to see if I could get it working again to get the rest off it. It actually made things worse, and to start with (after only 1 hour in the freezer ina ZipLoc bag) it wouldn't even spin up at all. Took a good 15 minutes before I could do anything with it at all, and it wasn't any better than before the freezing treatment.

deckie27

I know people think i'm mad.
I wish I had a video of my fix
That would convert the headens