Thread: My world lays in ruins...damn hardware!!!

most hard drive failures involve head touching platter. The space between head and platter is soooo small already that it doesn't take much for it to happen. I'm amazed hard drives last as long as they do with all the head and spinning, but alas, technology. By freezing the drive, the minute shrinkage caused by the change in temperature is often enough to get the drive functional again for a short period of time. Its amazing stuff really. If you have a lot of humidity in your place though this trick could go very sour because of condensation. Our buildings here at work are dehumidified I think.

Freezing works! Standard data recovery procedure when I worked at a computer repair shop about 10 years ago. What's funny is, after all these years, I never even thought about why it worked. Thanks, Arcana!

Interesting technique, I bet here in Arizona it would work really well.

I know from dropping quite a few cell phones and bluetooth headsets into pools that if you rip them apart quickly and toss them on the dashboard for a day they usually work again. Also, not a bad idea afterwards to take them in for a sonic bath because they seem to develop a gradual corrosion and die slowly otherwise.

We feel your pain, it hurts just to hear of what you are going though. Wishing you every success.

Anybody got any tricks for a pendrive... it got washed... I let it dry and it loaded once, but hasn't since.

Just make sure that if you do the freezer bit that you are ready to get in there, get your files on a usb or other media, and get out..