[NCLUG] Hard drive recovery

[F.L. Whiteley]

One trick that may work is to hard freeze the drive.  Seriously, seal it in
a ziplock bag and put it in the deep freeze overnight and really cold soak
it.  Then hook it up externally.  It's a 50/50 crapshoot, but I've recovered
95-100% of data from half of the drives I've done this with.  One drive gave
me five minutes while warming for each of six freeze cycles, but I got 95%
of it back.  It would not run at all after the seventh freeze.  I have one
in the freezer right now with a bunch of pictures on it.  Agilent used some
kind of cold gas to do the same thing.  Micro failures in circuitry
reconnect at low temperatures due to shrinkage of the circuit boards.
Sometimes the drives need a flick of the wrist or a thump to get the
platters spinning or the heads to move.  Be set up to start copying right
away as you may only get one crack.

YMMV

Frank Whiteley

-----Original Message-----
From: nclug-bounces at lists.nclug.org [mailto:nclug-bounces at lists.nclug.org]
On Behalf Of Michael Coffman
Sent: Monday, June 18, 2012 5:03 PM
To: nclug at lists.nclug.org
Subject: [NCLUG] Hard drive recovery

Hello,

Any suggestions on where to take or send a laptop hard drive to try and 
get data recovered from it?   I don't know the actual state of the drive 
as it isn't mine.   I have zero experience with laptops or trying to get
data from one that is 'broken'.   The person has taken it to officemax and 
bestbuy and they both said the drive could not be read.   Any 
recommendations for a local hardware guru that could maybe extract data from
the disks would be greatly appreciated.

-MichaelC
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