Freezing a Hard Drive to Fix it?!

My friend claims his father has fixed several corrupt hard drives by throwing them in a freezer for a month. A normal freezer, and no special freezer bag, just plop them right in. I just want to hear you comments on this

Sounds sketchy. Sort of like kicking your computer when it doesn't work properly.

http://www.meetmyattorney.com/slink/mt- ... 00275.html

Hard Drive in the Freezer Part 2
Over a year ago I wrote about freezing a dead hard drive and then putting it back into a computer. That blog receives many hits a month. Well here is an update to that story. A few weeks back, the same hard drive wouldn't boot up. It would click and click and then hang up. Well I took it out of the computer and headed for the freezer once again. After about an hour, I put it back in the computer and booted it up. It would not boot to Windows but I was able to get the DOS prompt. From here I ran scandisk and found a few problems on the disk. After the problems were fixed, I formatted the drive and installed Windows on it. A few days have past and it's still working fine. This must be one tough hard drive.

lol


http://hardware.mcse.ms/message56489-1.html

http://www.windowsbbs.com/showthread.php?t=33711




http://www.cybertechhelp.com/forums/arc ... 35674.html

http://www.pcreview.co.uk/showthread.php?t=4549


http://www.examnotes.net/article1030374.html


http://forums.vnunet.com/thread.jsp?for ... read=37916



I like mine with sprinkles.

A popular magic trick on TV is to make a watch start working again by asking the viewers to get a broken watch and rub it or something and then the TV show gets loads of callers. Loads probably being a tiny fraction of those who tried it and for who it worked. …but then if it works it works.

If it's old enough to lock up like that the system is probably due for an update anyway, it works but I would only do it to get my data to another drive.

Actually, there is a good reason why freezing you hard drive works. A lot of times why an old hard drive will fail is the internal parts becoming worn and the heads starting to make actual contact with the platters. Freezing the hard drive for an hour or so will make the metal contract enough so that the heads are lifted back off the platters and your data can be read from it. Of course, once it thaws back out, the heads will crash back on to the platters and kill it some more, so this is only a last chance soution to get important data off the drive.

Agreed

i'm just really suprised that condensation doesnt ruin the components? i mean the whol freezing to make the metal contract part kindof came to me but the whole water thing is confusing me

Its air tight?

I've used this technique to get data off bad HD's. You have a few minutes to recover what you want before it goes into a seek loop and starts clicking again. I don't know about this as a permanent fix, but it works real good for recovering those critical files you don't want to lose.

i do have a laptop HD that i froze and recovered files from that i recently was messing around with and was able to format and read/write to it with no problems. the last time i touched this drive was when i recovered the files from it. At that time it was in a seek loop and clicking, now it looks like it works, i don't think i would trust this drive for anything critical but i'll try it out as a portable drive and see how it performs.

If you ever freeze a drive i would suggest wrapping it in plastic wrap and then wrapping it again with a few paper towels. this seems to keep the frost of the electrical components pretty well...

Don't think the last reply work and it was pretty long so I will keep this on short
It works not for long after taken it out just 2min or so but 6 hours later I was able to get everthing off 20 gigs without any write or read loss data errors .

So it seems that the longer you freeze it, the longer you have to take the data off. Just keep it out of the heat