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Freezer Trick for borked HDDs...

newParadigm

newParadigm

Diamond Member
My drive stopped working. It squeels on bootup followed by loud clicks. I was recomended in OffTopic to put it in the freezer over night, and then copy everything off of it qa quick as possible.

If anyone hs more info about this please lmk

Thx
 
i've used it twice, both with great success. freeze it for a few hours, then put it in an external usb aluminum enclosure, and put one of those blue ice packs on it. mine worked for a couple hours like this. had plenty of time to mirror the drive. the longer you can keep it cold the longer it'll work.
 
im thinking, i was gonn put the drive in an ice/sal mixture in a cooler. Have the drive in a ziploc bag, so the bag is a little taller than the coler itself, and much taller than the waterline. shove the drive lal the way to the bottom, and it should be cool for a couple hours.

Im still gona run it with internal SATA/Power cables, this shoudlnt be a problem right?

Also, wahts faster, simply using windows to copy files, or using Ghost to clone it. Also in windows, if i copy half the drive to one 80gb and the other half to another 80gb, would it be faster to do it simultaneousley, or sequnetially?

Thx all

Vince
 
Hi, The freezer trick usually works on drives that wont spin up. Seems like the bearings for the platters wears or something and has too much friction for the motor to start. Freezing causes contraction and rewarming causes expansion and sometimes breaks the bearings loose. Maybe someone has a better explaination. Jim
 
Squealing on bootup could be either bad bearings, or a head crash.

The modern basis for the freezer trick is simply to get or keep the drive from overheating while you
attempt data recovery. That usually only requires an hour or so to cool it down, then connect it to
a system that you can copy the data over. If you are quick enough, then you should be able to
get the majority of data from the drive before it starts having problems.

I would not go for the overkill of the cooler scenario, until you have tried the simpler method of
just cooling it down for a little while, and seeing if that makes any difference in getting it to boot up at all.


Ghosting (or using Driveimage or Trueimage, or ever dd) would be better, because:
(1) you can boot from the emergency disk of these programs in less time than bringing up Windows,
(2) you don't have to wait for windows to check the drive before trying to recover data from it.
(3) if the data error has caused corruption of the NTFS file table, that can sometimes keep Windows
from booting properly.




 
My computer just "yelps" (noise) on boot and ends up saying "primary Hard Disk failure" after it detects the CD rom and CDRW. Won't boot any further. What could that be?
 
Originally posted by: Macro2
My computer just "yelps" (noise) on boot and ends up saying "primary Hard Disk failure" after it detects the CD rom and CDRW. Won't boot any further. What could that be?
Click to expand...

Hmmm what could it be, what could it be... my professional opinion is that you've had some sort of primary hard disk failure, but I could be wrong.
 
Originally posted by: Macro2
LOL can you be be more specific, LOL
Click to expand...

Most likely candidate is that your hard drive is dead.

Second most likely is that the IDE controller on your motherboard is acting up, though that would be a bit surprising if it can still detect the CD drives. (They are probobaly on another channel though).

 
If you have the means, remove the hard drive, put in a blank hard drive, install an OS on it (probably the one you currently use), and use it to recover whatever data you can off of the old broken one. If it's only broken enough to prevent windows from booting, you may get most of your data off it before it completely dies.
 
I'm about to attempt the freezer trick myself. My drive started clicking while in windows, and then it would lock up until the drive stopped clicking, then carry on. Now it won't always boot, and will give me a primary hard drive failure at boot. Sometimes I can get in windows, and I recoverd about 15gb of data so far, hopefuly the freezer trick will let it run long enough to mirror it with partiton magic.
 
I think this trick works in the event of a head crash (i.e. the read head has come in physical contact with the disk platter) because the decrease in temperature contracts the platter just enough that the head is lifted just above the platter again and able to do its job (until the platter heats and re-expands and the head crashes again).
 
It works, just did it last week on a laptop HD. I had connected it via EZbackup 2.5 PCCARD IDE adapter and windows would see it, not see it, see it again, whirrr-clunk. Put it in the freezer at work for a couple of hours, whipped it back to the PCCARD, booted system, it saw the drive backed up data ASAP. After all was backed up I ran some tests on the "bad" drive for several hours. Still working. Been using the freezer trick since the IBM PS/2 days when there stupid HDs either had to be smacked real hard or frozen.
 
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