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by Answer Rabbit on April 26th, 2006

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I've heard that putting my PC in the freezer can help with hard drive recovery. Is this true?

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  • by davoomac on April 26th, 2006

    davoomac

    Yes it can help with recovering data off of a dying hard drive. Originally thought to be an urban legend many people have tried the freezer trick and posted their success stories online. ***Placing the hard drive into a freezer for some period of time, usually for hours and hours, may not be advisable.

    It is easy to understand why it would make sense to place a hard drive in the freezer - after all, the drive got pretty hot and then it stopped working, and when it cooled down, it seemed to be readable for a while. This might have been the case if the hard drive was screeching or making knocking noises and then had transfer errors. Which happens quite frequently. Or because the freezer strengthens weak magnetic fields, making the data easier to read. Or because some failing electronics work better when they are cool (this is why the CPU has a fan on it).

    But the freezer causes condensation which can interfere with the mechanical operation of the drive. And it is better to cool down the specific failing component individually rather than the whole drive. And most people forget the drive in the freezer so the drive 'over-freezes'.

    Often, the result is not the easy recovery that was hoped for, but a recovery that may cost $3300-$4000, when it might originally have cost only $400.

    This article is a must-read for anyone who has run into a similar situation:

    From the "Trippy but True Hardware Fixes" department:

    For any of you out there who've had the wonderful misfortune of having a hard drive go totally belly-up on you, but recovering the data on the drive is absolutely necessary, check this out:

    One of my clients' old Maxtor drives finally went South on her this weekend, just as I was in the middle of migrating her data over to her brand new computer. The drive just suddenly died- whir!, click!, spin down, vanished, kaput. I couldn't get it to spin up again on a few subsequent power-cyclings of the machine, and not wanting to damage either of her computers, I took it back to my shop to try to revive it. I put it in three different computers (running Windows and Linux), but it refused to engage in any of them at all; all I got from the drive were a few sick-sounding whines, and one of the controller chips began to get really hot.

    I was just about to call her and give her the bad news when I remembered a really off-the-wall fix that I read about ages ago: wrap the drive in an anti-static bag, wrap that in couple of zip-lock baggies, and stick the beast in the freezer overnight. I Googled around a bit and found that this was considered to be a huge "Urban Legend" by many folks, but others said that the fix had indeed worked for them.

    WTF I thought- the drive can't be much more dead than it is now, right? Soooo... into the freezer she went (the drive, that is, not the client). Well, this morning I pulled the drive out of the fridge and stuck it back into one of my test boxes, and the damn thing spun right up, and stayed alive long enough to let me pull all of the data off to another drive!

    As weird as it sounded at first- it worked, so I just thought I'd pass my experience on in case it can pull anyone else out of a similar jam.
    http://www.daniweb.com/techtalkforums/thread9069.html

    *****Now before you go and try it please read this article it cautions you on the dangers of freezing your hard drive improperly:
    http://www.transparen.com/data-protection-group/data-recovery-freezer-method

    more resources on freezin your hard drive:
    http://www.trisweb.com/archives/2005/06/15/hard-disk-recovery-the-freezer-trick/
    http://www.transparen.com/data-protection-group/data-recovery-freezer-method
    http://www.pcmech.com/show/harddrive/664/7

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