Freezing your hard drive

Today has been an interesting day.  The hard drive on my laptop died.  It has been acting up for a few days and I kept saying "I need to back everything up before it dies".  Well, that didn't happen and it's dead.  I went down to our IT group to see if that had any utilities to help me out.  Make a mental picture of this.... It's around 4pm on a friday afternoon.  I walk in and say that my hard drive is dead.  They said, "Oh, we should put it in the freezer for the weekend and we'll check it out on monday."  I trust these guys, but at a glance this looks like "don't bother me on friday afternoon, let's wait until monday."  Well, there is no way I can wait until monday, so I brought the drive home and figured I could try it out here.  I just googled this and found out that there is some truth to this method.  Right now as I type this email (on my desktop), my hard drive is in the fridge "chillin out".  Wish me luck!   I'll let you know if this works out for me.

Print | posted @ Friday, February 8, 2008 9:28 PM

Comments on this entry:

Gravatar # re: Freezing your hard drive
by HeroPsycho at 2/9/2008 2:19 PM

Check out www.spinrite.info

The product freakin' works!!!
Gravatar # re: Freezing your hard drive
by John Workman at 2/10/2008 10:48 PM

It works!!!! I found an article on line that said to put it in the fridge, not the freezer. It stated that you do not want it to get colder than 30 F. I did it overnight and it worked. The first time I booted up it still failed, I tried a second time and it worked!!! After about 20 minutes, it started to make noises. I put a gel ice pack under the laptop and kept working. I had it running for over an hour while I backed everything up. I found several files that were corrupt, but for the most part I recovered my data. Now starts the fun process of getting a new image on a new drive and reloading all my stuff.
Gravatar # re: Freezing your hard drive
by todd at 2/13/2008 3:37 PM

Go buy: http://www.grc.com/spinrite.htm It has worked EVERY TIME I've had a HD die.
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