[NCLUG] Hard drive recovery

[Chad Perrin]

On Mon, Jun 18, 2012 at 10:01:31PM -0600, F.L. Whiteley wrote:
> 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.

Don't do this unless you need to.  We don't actually know yet if the
drive itself has stopped working, as far as I'm aware.

-- 
Chad Perrin [ original content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ]