Trick to rescue data from a dying HDD ..

Cov

Cov

Gawd
Joined
Dec 3, 2007
Messages
917
Hi,

I'm not affected (yet), but I have come across the following information and I just wonder if anyone has actually tried this out:

This is going to sound really weird, but if your hard drive is dead and you forgot to back up one or two small files, I have a trick that might just save you! Take your drive out, put it in a plastic bag, and suck out most of the air. Next, put it in the freezer for about an hour. Then take it out, plug it into your machine, and try to transfer anything to a backup as quickly as possible.

I’ve used this technique many times and it usually buys me about 20 minutes of extra time to get all my files out of the hard drive. It works wonders as a last resort. I can’t find a definitive answer on why this works, but my theory is that the cold causes all of the metal parts to contract, freeing up any problems momentarily.
Click to expand...
source
 
Freezing a hard drive will permanently damage it due to condensation, whether or not you put it in a ziplock bag, and does nothing to even temporarily fix the drive, despite anecdotal reports of users who have no idea what they are doing:

Much more reliable source
 
I've only seen it work once and once it croaked, it was gone. It is much easier to blast the chips with freeezing spray when trying to find a thermal failure.
 
It will work on occasion for MECHANICAL HD problems.

If you can't determine between mechanical and/or data corruption don't bother.
 
it all depends on the issues yes.

Always attempt to recover as much as possible first.
I have mounted large heatsinks/fans onto drives to cool them, sometimes helps recover data, mechanical/bearing issues.

The freezer trick, has helped me sometimes, but I only attempt this, after I write the drive off as completely failed, and don't attempt to recover any more data. I would not deep freeze the drive though.
 
Old Hippie said:
It will work on occasion for MECHANICAL HD problems.

If you can't determine between mechanical and/or data corruption don't bother.
Click to expand...

this, I have had it unstick a mechanical issue long enough to access the drive one last time

it is a last ditch strategy but it does sometimes work
 
interesting, .. thanks all for your input.
Hopefully mechanical hard drives are going to be replaced by non-mechanical sometimes soon.
 
I've frozen a hard drive for 20 mins before. It worked long enough to get the data off.
 
non-mechanical can be a worse issue to attempt recovery :)

On a mechanical disk, atleast you can do a logic board swap and give it a shot. but that isn't something you can do on an ssd.
 
J Macker said:
I've frozen a hard drive for 20 mins before. It worked long enough to get the data off.
Click to expand...


I've also heard of someone doing this with a hard drive in raid 5 to recover the array Shocked it worked but it did. :eek:
 
That's a pretty cool trick. Good to know if I ever need to recover data on one of my old drives. As a last resort kind of thing.
 
Click of death is a mechanical failure and is one failure that I have had limited but some success with using this technique to recover data. I was able to freeze the drive pull some data and repeat until most of the data was recovered. As for the person that stated it will permanently damage the drive, I would say that I have not had any issues with it doing that as one of the drives that I performed this trick on actually continued to work "flawlessly" (I noticed no issues) for a while after this. I only continued to use it for a few weeks out of curiousity and once that was over I replaced the drive. However, I will say this is an extremely last resort solution if you don't want to fork over the money to have a professional pull the data off of it.
 
Cov said:
interesting, .. thanks all for your input.
Hopefully mechanical hard drives are going to be replaced by non-mechanical sometimes soon.
Click to expand...

No hopefully people start making backups. If it can store data, nonmechanical or otherwise it can fail. If it uses electricity it can fail/fry.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top