Hard Drive Freezer Trick

As an experienced professional in the IT industry, I will tell you that the hard drive freezer trick is not a myth. I was actually surprised to see how many articles and forum posts there are online that claim that freezing a drive in attempt to recover data never works. This trick involves some luck, but you must also be sure to do it correctly. Don't expect this to be a permanent fix, because it isn't. Also, don't expect this to work with a bad drive every time. What you can expect from this trick is to possibly get your drive to spin up long enough for you to copy over important files to a different device. While the hard drive freezer trick can possibly do more harm than good to the drive, there is a chance that the cooler temperature will allow it to function for a short period of time. Again, this could actually damage the drive even more and make it harder to recover data using other methods. If your data is worth a significant chunk of money to you, I would suggest seeking professional data recovery services. Step 1 Wrap the hard drive in some kind of absorbent material (dish cloth, ShamWow, etc...) Step 2 Put the hard drive in a sealed bag (ziplock bag, anti-static bag, etc...) Step 3 Put the hard drive in the freezer for several hours. Step 4a Take the hard drive out of the freezer, bag, and cloth. Connect it to your computer (while the system is powered off). Start the computer and be ready to start pulling data off of it as soon as possible (assuming that it finishes booting). Step 4b It actually works much better if you don't rely on the operating system installed on the bad hard drive. You could use an IDE/SATA to USB adapter to connect the bad drive to a computer that already has an operating system loaded and ready to go. With an adapter, you can also connect the drive to the computer while it is already running. Using this method, you will buy yourself some extra time and increase your chances of recovering the data that you need.

Blaine Blodgette is a CompTIA A+, Linux+, and Cisco CCNA certified professional in the IT industry. Freezer Trick. http://www.SomebodyStoleMyDomain.com