Testing the ‘Hard drive in the Freezer’ Trick
I have a customer with a dead drive. Although occasionally it seems like it will work for a few minutes. It’ll be the intent of this article to test the hard-drive in freezer trick for this clicking and decrepit drive. Let’s see if it works!
Update 1:
It’s in a zip-back in the freezer! Let’s see what happens!
Update 2:
Pulled out of freezer, plugged in and…. WORKS! Holy hell it actually…oh wait it stopped working.
Conclusion:
I was going to write a complete right up about this, before I tested it and more or less got disappointed results. I was amazed that I was almost to boot windows before the drive fell back into senility. So there is definitely some truth to this but your mileage is definitely going to vary.
This guy here wrote a really snazzy write up: http://geeksaresexy.blogspot.com/2006/01/freeze-your-hard-drive-to-recover-data.html
The idea with putting your HDD in the freezer is actually just to make it really cold. You’ll notice that it only worked for a few minutes until it heated up. The idea is to use those few minutes very wisely to copy off what you can.