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.