I put the hard drive in the freezer. Sure, I had read about how you could get a failing drive to work by cooling it down, but I hadn’t really seen it happen.
After a few hours I connected it to my computer…
*bing*
The thing came right up, working like a charm.
Wow!
The drive belongs to a friend who had lost all her photos and lots of other stuff when that it failed so I was prepared and started copying everything important to another location, leaving behind lots of music and movies.
– I’ll come back for that later, when I have somewhere to store it, was my thought.
Two days later. The drive’s still in the freezer. I hook it up.
Nothing.
– What the hell? It can’t be dead now. Not yet. I’m not done.
Tried flipping it over and it came right up again.
That lasted only for so long.
Now it’s dead. Really.
All in all, this was a great success. All the important stuff, that can’t be recreated, was rescued. The rest can be recovered in other ways.
It was a great learning experience for my friend too. Now she has a backup, or maybe even two.
So, you really can resurrect a broken drive by putting it in the freezer, if you’re lucky. Don’t count on it though. Always at least one backup, stored in your car, in your office or anywhere except where you keep the original data.