Putting a hard drive in the freezer works

I somehow damaged one of my hard drives when I was rebuilding my computer. I tried to get it to work for a day or two and then just about gave up.

But I remembered a trick that I had heard about but hadn't tried myself.

I put the hard drive in a freezer bag and put it in the freezer. I left it in there for two days and then got it out about a half hour ago.

I'll be dang. My computer recognized it. I had a lot of pictures and music on that hard drive that I hadn't backed up to disk.

The files are all successfully moved over to one of my new hard drives. And you can bet I'll be burning all of them to disk as well.

So putting a dead hard drive in the freezer isn't an internet myth.

 

Just one that doesn't work 100% of the time.
Had luck smiling on you this time. Next time ???

 

Yeah, I consider myself fortunate.

But I won't risk any data and reuse that hard again. It's going to be a paperweight now. :-D

 

I would think "target". If you got data from it, someone else could possibly.

 

Could be "hammer" time.:-D

 

I'm not too concerned about someone getting ahold of it and finding anything personal. Ain't nothing on there such as personal info. Just a lot of pictures from fishing trips and a lot of music. And none of the pictures are of me in the nude. :-D

Using it for a target now does sound like a fun idea.

 

I've heard some success stories and other stories that the HDD didn't work. As hrlow2 suggested, you were lucky this time

 

http://www.deepjiveinterests.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/09/stop-hammer-time.jpg

 

I've herd of this trick working before. Glad it worked for you and you got your data back.

 

The old basic electronics trick was to spray Freon on faulty circuit boards: you'd target one integrated circuit at a time, and repeat for any other ICs until the symptoms changed...the super-cold Freon, of course, tended to cause the various metals in the chips (or the lead/silver in the solder connections) to contract, which could sometimes temporarily "fix" a board...

I can see a correlation between the Freon and a freezer...

Cool...

 

Yup, it's a good trick on the very rare occasions that it's the only thing that'll get the drive started - barring throwing $$$$ at specialists.

I've done it myself once and supervised it on a second occasion (always better to have 2 people, saves valuable seconds); first time was mechanical, second was a chip on the controller breaking down.

How about a new windsock and some fridge magnets?