OT: frozen hard disk

[Andrew Jarrett]

On 10/15/07, Nigel Ridley <nigel at rmk.co.il> wrote:
> This is really OT but it might help somebody:
> My daughter's old laptop running Feisty Fawn suddenly stopped working -
> it 'froze' and so she did a 'reset'. After the bios messages up comes a
> "cannot find an operating system' (or something similar). I tried when I
> came home from work - same thing. Stuck a Knoppix CD in and everything
> loaded OK but no hard disk icons on the desktop - not good!
>
> Took the hard disk out of the laptop and put it in the freezer
> overnight. Took it out in the morning to warm up and get rid of any
> condensation - put it back in the laptop after work and fired it up.
> Everything ran as it should and I quickly copied all her files over to
> my box via nfs and burnt them to a CD.
>
> So just in case anybody else has a 'stuck' hard disk - stick it in the
> freezer overnight - it works (YMMV).
>
> Remember that Beatles song 'Yesterday' - here's a version to remind us
> all about the necessity of making regular backups:
> http://tinyurl.com/2rw7lr
> (I've used a tinyurl as the original is toooo long).
>
> Blessings,
>
> Nigel

I've heard many people have luck with this.  A tip for everyone
inexperienced in this area is: Clicking is not a feature of a hard
drive.  If you ever hear your hard drive start clicking, get the data
off as fast as you can.  If your drive won't correctly mount: freeze
it, replace the pcb with the pcb of a functioning one (same model), or
send it to professional data recovery centers (expensive).  I just
recently lost a relatively new 500GB Maxtor external USB drive.  It
doesn't even mount to the computer,  but I have yet to try to freeze
it (it didn't have anything really important on it).  It's still under
warranty thankfully.

Andrew

-- 
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2