Anyone Ever Successfully "Freeze" A Dead Hard Drive Back To Life?
 

Does it work? Read on...

http://www.geeksugar.com/Freezing-Br...e-Data-2147290

I'm not sure what this has to do with the fact that anyone wanting less government is evil......












.:winkwink:

It's a myth

Nope. Tried it a few years ago, but it never worked again...

Right up there with the "technical tap" [smacking broken electronics].

I was in Vegas for the Jan show and due to give a seminar on marketing. I was working on presentation and only copy was on my laptop. Which died 2 hours before seminar. Took it to Apple store and they guy worked on things for about 40 mins before trying freezing it.

Waiting 20-30 mins and it worked for long enough for me to get the data off and do the presentation.

One of my drives just died this weekend. Totally sucks, but it happens. 2nd one in around 7 years for me.

The last time I just reformatted it and it worked again, but of course everything was lost. I used it to give a freelancer a bunch of files and told him to keep the drive, as I didn't really trust it any longer.

I can reformat this one too, as it is unrecognizable and wants to be initiated. I'm thinking about maybe freezing it, but I just don't believe it will really work...

I call that "percussive maintenance"

:)

dayum, you lucked out. wish i had known about this on more than one occasion.

tried it and failed at it.

on a side note, they make great coasters and keep your beverage cold.

I did it with a WD Caviar a few years back that failed, it would spin up and then shut down after a few seconds. So I stuck it in the freezer for 20 minutes and then connected it and it stayed alive just long enough to get what I wanted off it.

Actually, it's called the million dollar thumb :P

It would be pretty fricken cool if it did work. Please let us know!

Depending on what the problem with the drive is, the freezing method could work to allow you to get important data off. This is just another lesson in keeping current backups of critical content. :)

Tried it a few times with my fingers crossed and said a few prayers, turns out there's no god and the freezer trick doesn't work.

Well... if you really absolutely must save the data... you could buy a new hdd, same make and model.. then, in an extremely clean environment, dissect and remove the platters from the dead drive, and install them into the new one.

The downside is, it's extremely difficult to do, and one spec of dust or a little static can render your efforts & money spent on the new drive wasted...

I used a disk utility program, and got really lucky. It had a corrupted file that needed repair, and it's all good now. Amazing!

No freezer trick needed, but now I know something new for next time. Plus I just ordered a bunch of new backup drives, so I can keep double backups of everything just in case.

Tried it, it didn't work

The freezer trick was intended for drives that locked up (usually due to heat)... not to fix corrupted files :P

If your HDD spins up and actually functions, the freezer trick is useless.

Disk space is cheap. Why wouldn't you use RAID in your desktop machines?

Oh. So I was lying. Fucking hell I should stop doing that. Really.

What disk utility program worked?

Just an internal disc utility found on my oldest mac.

Part of the OS. It's a really old system 9 box.

i just had two western digital portable drives fail and i tried the freeze trick but it didn't work. i think the only time that works is if there is a solder joint issue on the board.

i'm done with WD. costco carries them so i gave them a try. after those two failed i bought the LaCie 2Big Quatra 6TB RAID and i love it. i back the RAID up with seagates. so far, so good.