What is Digg?109 Comments
- JesperL, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2"I worked for me also when one of my hd crashed last year, but it only lasted a couple days which was more than enough time to retrieve my pr0n files back." - Unfortunately, all the pr0n was now Swedish.
Meh. - coOLcAT, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Well, I stuck my harddrive in the oven and that seemed to delete all the data, so it only follows that this would work.
- matthewf01, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2It seems that you weren't able to recover your ability to properly spell "technique".
- clevershark, on 10/12/2007, -1/+31. get a USB enclosure
2. put HD in it.
3. put the whole thing in the freezer
4. about 4 hours later, connect the USB drive but leave it in the freezer.
That should buy enough time to recover whatever's recoverable... - Vill4no, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2I worked for me also when one of my hd crashed last year, but it only lasted a couple days which was more than enough time to retrieve my pr0n files back.
- JesseJ, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Jesus saves. I make backups.
- matthewf01, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1its not a hack.
- matthewf01, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1HAH! DRM.
RMA.
same thing. - vrajput, on 01/19/2009, -0/+0Before some days I lost my data when I was formating my computer, It was was very important because my clients details was in my computer, Then One of my friend suggest me to use the stellar data recovery software and believe me I have recover my all data..Thanks stellar ( http://www.stellarinfo.com/ ) you save my business life...
- mvidata, on 06/18/2009, -0/+0RAID 0, 1, 5 Data Recovery MVI RAID Data Recovery engineers specialise and have experience in recovering data from complicated RAID arrays, RAID 5, RAID 1 and RAID 0. If your company or home business has been affected by RAID corruption or hardware failure, please call our emergency RAID data recovery department on 0800 050 1128.
http://www.mvidatarecovery.com
http://www.mvidatarecovery.com/raid-data-recovery. ... - diggitdiggit, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Here is the deal:
My family has a Dell XP Home, and a old Dell ME. The me had some hd problems before, doing some stuff with masters/slaves and replacing; couple years ago. It was like 9 or 10 on a school night, I wasn't thinking clearly. I opened to the pc for no particular reason. Then I remembered that I had wanted to switch hds, C and D. Drive C was a 120 GB, nice and big. For some reason, it failed and said that it only had 30MB. Weird?! So I switched the primary drive to D, which had 80GB, so I was fine. Then I tried to switch drives, WITHOUT TURNING OFF THE PWR! I openly accept mocking insults and ridicules. So a thin wisp of smoke goes up from C, and I quickly powered down. Then it didn't find C or D. Ran some recovery programs from a disc. NO LUCK. So now the hds are in the freezer (in a plastic bag :) already for 24 hrs. I'm going away for the weekend, so like 100 hrs it will be in the freezer. I'll post later on how it'll work. My mom will kill me if she finds out I crashed and possibly destroyed the hd. But a computer techie at school said he'd give me a free 2GB hd, so possibly I'll live. I hope.
I'll Post Later
10/4 - ritjobbie, on 11/18/2008, -0/+0I have firewire cables going into a freezer from a computer as we speak...
- the4starish, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0OK so here's the story. Last night I set up my comp to download some episodes of "Lost" on Bit-Torrent. This morning I go to check the progress and its completely frozen. Buttons do nothing. I do a manual power cycle and I hear the hard drive try to start up and then nothing. No clicks, ticks, beeps or sounds. As a matter of fact, the screen doesn't even light up. I take out the drive and boot up and the bios come on. I put the drive back in and back to nothing. I was about to give up and take it to a repair shop or something but then I fortunately stumbled upon this by searching on google. Then I read like 4 posts and said screw it, I'm trying it. So I put my 80GB Hitachi Travelstar Notebook hard drive into the freezer in some zip-lock bags. I come back to read what the rest of the posts say and someone warned about zip-lock bags and static electricity. So I run back downstairs and take it out. About 10 minutes had gone by. For kick and giggles, I popped it back into my laptop and sure enough, IT WORKED!!! I only left it on for like 15 minutes to get some homework and other important files off of it, but it worked!!! And I didn't even freeze it overnight like some said. I haven't turned it on since because I'm going to buy Norton Ghost to backup the drive and make an exact image of the drive so that if this drive gets really messed up beyond freezing, I can just pop in the discs and not skip a beat.
- ninev, on 11/18/2007, -0/+0zxpvihapwreijpaojer poaisjd fpoaisjdfpahsdpfihaspdfih
- ninev, on 11/18/2007, -0/+0digg.com sucks ass because they put fake statistics or their scripts arent working right
- extreme8, on 01/09/2008, -0/+0This is the real deal folks.
I found this thread years ago and promised myself I'd try it if I ever ran into this problem
Well. last week I did. My external drive with all of my photos went south and I had no luck getting it back online.
Popped it in the freezer for 3 hours and I could read it for 4 or 5 minutes.
Tried this several times with the same results.
Went out and got some dry ice, packed the drive and the dry ice into a box, and recovered ALL of my data.
Why does it work??? Who knows.
It wasn't a problem with the drive spinning up, what we used to call a "stickion" problem, but for some reason it worked long enough for me to recover my critical data (several hours once the dry ice was used).
As soon as the drive wams up it dies again, but I got what I needed.
I'm a happy camper. - joshsz, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I've done this before, it's worked every time on drives that start making clicking noises
- alceria, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0My one-month old harddrive died in my new laptop and I stuck it in the freezer and then set it up as a slave on my desktop. I was able to get some important files off it but it died when I got to transferring my photos. I hadn't put a lot of photos on this harddrive, but I did have a couple folders worth of good concert footage that was lost.
Nothing is worse than that tell tale clicking of a dead drive. :( - shoota, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I can personally verify this works. We had a power outage last night, and even though I had UPS when I was shutting down the box the screen corrupted. So I tried to boot this morning and the hard drive was being recognizec by the bios as _DK-CASDADFS@@#$@!@#$adsf etc. when it should have read WDC-MODELNUMBER, anyway it wouldn't boot the os. I threw it in the freezer this afternoon, and its been working fine since, i've rebooted like three times and backed up all my files so I don't know when this drive is going to go now though.
- mat32, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Interresting !
It costs a small fortune to recover a hard drive by a company…ouf !
Here’s my problem : I have a western digital 80 gig…by rebooting a couple of times, DOS recognises it but the hard drive keeps doing a half-spin and stopping, along with the clicking sound…So I guess this is a mechanical problem…
My question is this : if I had a working twin of my hard drive, would switching only the « LOGIC BOARD » make it spin correctly so I can recover…what do you think guys ? please any help would be very much appreciated :)
Ps. : I tried the freezer thing, it did not work :( ...I also tried tapping it a few times...nothing...same problem...keeps doing the half-spin...
Mat.
from Canada
maksou@yahoo.com
Thanks a million - webcompanion, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Didn't know if this would work... but I bought an internal-to-external hard drive converter (hooked up to it via USB) and went to work. The 40 gig drive I had that was making a clicking sound sat in the freezer about 4 hours prior to doing the following stuff.
At first I powered up while the drive was in the freezer and it didn't work, so I tried changing the jumpers from cable select to slave, then slave to master. Still no luck. Changed it back to cable select and heard the drive clicking. I started to whack the drive against the inside of the freezer, somewhat gently. It still continued to click... but for some reason after about 2-3 minutes more Windows started to try and autoplay the drive. It was scanning all the directories on the drive for an autorun.inf which I then cancelled and went to work. I managed to get all the critical data off the drive with what seems to be no data transfer errors. Amazing!
Super ++++helpful digg!!! - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I tried it once and it didn't work for me
- sav2880, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0This is total reality. I recovered an old 40 gig drive this way once long enough to get the data, then ship it back to be DRM'ed
- clevershark, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0>Temperature dipped to -40 that night and well the harddisk died for ever. <
A normal freezer definitely never gets that cold. - kohno214, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I've had this technique work 2 out of the 3 times that I've tried it.
- bkr82, on 10/10/2007, -0/+0Well this certainly worked for me. And I'm so glad, had almost 500GB of music to save. My parents weren't so happy though as I turned their freezer down to -30°C! Now undergoing the process of burning to CD, think I've learnt my lesson about not backing up data. I would however recommend putting some silica gel in the bag with the hard drive as i noticed it was a bit frosty when it came out of the freezer.
- galegovision, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Just did it last night and it saved my ass. I was able to get all my files, the drive ran for about 3 hours! Sweet, great story.
- Hozezero, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I read the same article and tried it with my dead 80gig drive. Froze it over night, and stuck it in my mobile rack. Took a long time to boot, but i was able to read the drive and copy it for about 4 hours. Stuck it back in the freezer and did the same thing the next day. I was able to get all the data i needed. So i guess I'm saying Ive had %100 luck with this, but only tried it once.
- warpdude, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I actually did this last night, to recover music off my dying iPod. Popped it in the freezer for twenty minutes, and had about five minutes to copy all my music off - it wasn't enough for all 20-ish GB, so I had to do several freezes. I've tried it several times previously on other hard disks without any success, but I'm a firm believer now that it has worked.
- pugsby, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I've successfully used this trick quite a few times. My father told it to me, and I didn't believe. But after about 5 successful attempts of at least buying enough time to save things, I've spread this little trick religiously.
- agimat, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0took a different approach...threatened the thing with fire and it started working again. never gave me problems ever since
- BGFeltenink, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0NOoOOOoooo
I just tossed my external western digital. Damn thing had all of my awesome stuff too. I had the click of death so I figured it was worthless, guess I'll be remembering this next time. - kweber103, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Works for me saved my laptop!
- clipper453, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I actually stumbled upon this solution just last week on my own. My Mac Mini failed to boot and I couldn't even get it to boot to the OSX DVD, so I took it to the local Apple store for diagnosis. It had been sitting in the car all day while I was at work just "chilling out". When I got to the Apple Store, they plugged it in and it booted up to the harddrive right away. Then, as the unit heated up, it bogged down.
I quickly surmised that by cooling the harddrive, it was enough to free up the bearings to get it to work again. So the Apple Store ordered me a new replacement harddrive, and in the meantime I took the unit home to attempt to copy the data to an external drive.
When I got home I placed several ziplock bags filled with ice around the Mac Mini and booted up. It took a couple hours and few change-outs of ice, but I finally got all the data copied over.
- Clipper453 - midorigin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0No luck the only time I tried it on a clicking laptop drive. Only froze it for two hours though, which may not have been enough.
- dcipjr, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0An old issue of MacUser (circa 1997) dealt wth this.
Maybe it'll work, but here's the problem: toss a beer mug in the freezer and wait a few hours. Now take it out and have a look. What's on the mug? That's right -- frozen water. Condensation. Therefore, if you do this to your hard drive, I wouldn't expect it to work for that much longer due to probable water build-up inside the drive. Water + Electronics = Bad.
I'd leave the drive recovery to the drive recovery specialists. - Hozezero, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0^^thats why you should use a plastic bag
- toyotaboy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I don't think it works because it's fixing scratches. usually when a drive goes bad, it's the bearing failing (think about how much your platter spins), and it shrinks the parts, as well as adds condensation (which acts as a lubricant) to help it spin. Notice that when drives start to go bad they get noisy. I've done this twice and both times it worked.
- catoutfit, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0i put my 80GB Maxator that crashed dubiously about a week after my waranty ended into the freezer and it has worked ever since!
- yamadatroy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I've done it a few times and the drives worked long enough for me to recover data off of the them.
- ripcrd, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I've done it at least 50 times that it worked. I worked in an office with tons of similar hardware. We swapped boards on some also as you could see that a controller chip on the board had burned out. It had a dark spot on it. I had one of that model get so hot, it set a piece of paper on fire. Oddly, it was the ticket on repairing/recovering the drive data.
As other say, if you wait too long after initial failure, you may not get anything. We sometimes would Ghost the drive, but usually we would just copy the users' documents folder and favorites and grab their mail file archives.
If you have a File Allocation Table (FAT) failure, then I recommend Get Data Back for NTFS or FAT. 2 different products from Runtime Software. Worked great, but expensive. It was cheaper than sending off to a data recovery service. We charged the software expense to the dept. that needed it and then used it for several other recoveries. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0"Spun" not "spinned".
- feross, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0YES It works. I did it 3 times, 2 out of the 3 it worked. Guess it depends on what breaks inside that makes it work again. One drive lasted a couple of hours before it fried again, the other one lasted about 30 minutes. I wrapped the drives in paper towels (soak up condensation when getting warm), put them in a zip-lok bag and into the freezer. When I connect them back I didn't take them out of the bag, just hooked them up that way so that they would stay cold longer.
- cdreiling, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I throw mine in between the peas and carrots.
- Brak710101, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0This reminds me of the frozen-HD-on-a-stick photos. But those were a joke... I hope.
Remember the plastic, air sealed bag, please! - Cambo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I have done this many times with about a 50% success rate...
- jholdaway, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Has anyone tried placing the frozen HDD in a box with dry ice when booting? I would think it would delay the warming back up of the drive for a few extra min.
- Snowdizzle, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0HELLOOOOOO Anyone ever heard of fluid bearings... DUH!!!!
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