hard drive in the freezer.

I have read about it, but never had success with it. Putting a dead/dying hard drive in the freezer supposedly can bring it back to life in some cases.

A customer brought me a laptop with a hard drive making a grinding noise and would not boot at all, either lock up or get stuck in a BSOD reboot cycle. Hooking it up as a secondary drive and trying to run some data recovery software on it didn't work, as the drive wouldn't even show up windows or the recovery apps.

So I figured with nothing left to lose, why not try the freezer. So I put it in a static bag and froze it for about an hour.

Then I hooked it back up as a secondary drive, and this time, while windows was booting it came up with a checkdisk for the slaved drive. This happened before but froze at 78% each time. Now it went through all chkdsk phases, and cleaned up a ton of file system errors. I was able to pull some user data off real quick once I got into windows (just using explorer, not a recovery app) and then I put it back into the laptop it came from, and the laptop booted up perfectly.

Of course I told them its lifespan is anywhere from a few years to about 5 minutes, so they came to grab it and finish extracting whatever data they needed to.

So chalk one up for freezing a bad drive, I guess it really does work once in a while.

I think that the longer it says in the freezer the longer you might get it to run (at list for a finite amount of time). The longest I tried for was about 6 hours.

The only logic I can see is being where the internals of the drive have become swollen, and freezing it contracts the metal to unstick the actuator arm or get a spindle moving again. If the issue is not related to something that contracting the metal would help (like a burnt out motor), then it likely would have no impact (or make things worse).

Maybe the hard drive was over-heated that is the only reason I can thing of as why you would put it such a cool place such as a freezer. Also, like Matt said I am surprised that the extreme cold did not do extreme damage to the hard drive.

freezing them isn't damaging. But you have to be aware there is a risk of condensation as they warm up.

Nice! I've only heard of that working. Never tried it myself! Kudos!

I actually got an email from the customer today saying that the laptop is still working. Nice to have a "last resort" type of recovery option.

I tried it on another guys HD that was in worse shape, and I was able to get SOME data off it after freezing (more than I was able to get before freezing) but the drive was pretty far gone, and I couldn't do a full recovery. Got some important data though.

i tried that on the drive i rma'd. It didn't work.

Its nice to hear it works sometimes.

i'd still recommend a drive replacement for that laptop. most likely they dropped their laptop but possibly it is a failing drive.

They just wanted data off it, then planned to recycle the whole thing. It was pretty old and they got a new one to replace it. It was just a matter of getting the data from the old machine.

I've tried it once. It seemed to help a little bit. But the drive quickly reverted back to not working, and eventually it wouldn't detect no matter what.

I even moved the PC next to the fridge and operated it while it was inside the freezer. Didn't help. Western Digital RMA'd it for me, at least.

I have never heard of this till I read this thread. Nice to know this. Does it work with external hard-disks as well?

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Originally Posted by abhijit

I have never heard of this till I read this thread. Nice to know this. Does it work with external hard-disks as well?

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there is no difference in the actual drive. They are all the same.

On a side note, i got two more free computers from my local dumpster and let this be a lesson to you all to delete all photos and videos before trashing something. I hit the jackpot on both of them.