Recover a dead hard drive by freezing it!

[Herzog]

This happened to me last night. I've heard about this before but I was always skeptic about it...

If you have a drive fail on you, at least try one last resort to recover your data before you run around in circles kicking objects and children. Put your drive in a plastic ziplock and toss it (gently) in the freezer for an hour or few. I've read that this only really works on drives that stop spinning because of a tolerance failure. Freezing the drive can put the drive head back into tolerance range temporarily so you can grab your data!

Luckily, it actually worked for me last night.

I've read that you want to keep it as cold as possible while running it again, hence the icepack on top. I was able to grab over 100Gb of important stuff off the drive. If I needed more time I'd probably do a small cooler with ice around the bag... but really it's probably just a crap-shoot at that point.

:greg:

 

[I Lean]

I tried it, based on your rumors....but it didn't do anything for me.

 

[Stephen]

We used to freeze drives all the time at MacDocs to recover data. I'd say it worked slightly more than half the time. Glad it worked for you!

 

[phatfoto]

I might still have a couple dead drives worth trying this on. Makes me glad I backup to an external drive once a week. I learned this the hard way!!! (And I'm SO paranoid, that drive is backed up to another once a month and stored away from everything else!) Guess I might even mention I backup my Android phone and my iPad... I'm just a bit insane.

 

[jmaxj]

it worked for me too a couple yrs ago. it was one of those what the heck i'll see what happens kind of things and it worked.