The freezer trick!

megamaced

megamaced

Geek Geek Geek!
Unfortunately the hard drive in my ancient Samsumg laptop died the other day. The boot screen loads up but then the read / write errors begin. The hard drive is an old IBM Travelstar and it's not the first time one of these drives has failed on me. Thankfully I have no important data on the hard drive; only a copy of Xubuntu 7.04 formatted with JFS.

Seen as I have nothing to lose, I've decided to debunk the myth about whether putting a hard drive in the freezer can bring it back to life. I plan to leave the hard drive in the freezer for about 24 hours. I'll insert it back into the laptop and see whether its brought back to life. I'll then monitor how long it continues to work!
 
i think it should work but not for extended periods

normally its only if ur hard drive heads become stuck or something and you put it in the freezer maybe for an hour and then conncet it to qucikly get everything you can off it before it heats up and messes up again.
i understand what your on about and it may work but maybe not for long term use
 
mega said:
Unfortunately the hard drive in my ancient Samsumg laptop died the other day. The boot screen loads up but then the read / write errors begin. The hard drive is an old IBM Travelstar and it's not the first time one of these drives has failed on me. Thankfully I have no important data on the hard drive; only a copy of Xubuntu 7.04 formatted with JFS.

Seen as I have nothing to lose, I've decided to debunk the myth about whether putting a hard drive in the freezer can bring it back to life. I plan to leave the hard drive in the freezer for about 24 hours. I'll insert it back into the laptop and see whether its brought back to life. I'll then monitor how long it continues to work!
Click to expand...
yeah, your right to leave it in freezer for 24 hours, it may then work for about 20 minutes then it'll need refreezing for about an hour then it will probably work for another 20 mins, and repeat freezing for an hour and running it for 20 mins until you've recovered all your data, generally it is only used for data recover, however depending opon the HDD part that has failed, the HDD could be fixed (if the read / write heads are stuck on the platters the HDD will be fixed)

BTW: seal the HDD in an anti static bag before you drop it in the freezer
 
donkey42 said:
yeah, your right to leave it in freezer for 24 hours, it may then work for about 20 minutes then it'll need refreezing for about an hour then it will probably work for another 20 mins, and repeat freezing for an hour and running it for 20 mins until you've recovered all your data, generally it is only used for data recover, however depending opon the HDD part that has failed, the HDD could be fixed (if the read / write heads are stuck on the platters the HDD will be fixed)

BTW: seal the HDD in an anti static bag before you drop it in the freezer
Click to expand...

mega doesnt need to recover any data, he just wants to see how long it would work without errors, thats if it works
 
izzy007 said:
mega doesnt need to recover any data, he just wants to see how long it would work without errors, thats if it works
Click to expand...
yeah, i know, i was just explaining how it works
 
As long as it's no head problem, this freezing thing has helped me to recover data or at least ensure that all data has been rendered unreadable quite a few times...
 
Meh it didn't work! I left the hard drive in the freezer for a good 24 hours but it didn't make any difference! The hard drive was still making the clicking noises!
 
megamaced said:
Meh it didn't work! I left the hard drive in the freezer for a good 24 hours but it didn't make any difference! The hard drive was still making the clicking noises!
Click to expand...

so the hd was dead? i thought that it went up to the windows screen and gave errors.. it would've probably worked if that was the poblem but i havent really heard of dead hd's with clicking noises working again.
 
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