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Resurrecting Dead Harddrives?
Broue Master asks: "The main harddrive of a friend's computer stopped working. He described to me that the computer began by emitting strange 'scratching sounds', and after a while, it made a 'loud *tock* sound' and stopped. He tried to reboot it but soon realized that the harddrive wasn't spinning anymore. He asked me if I could revive it, at least long enough so that he could retrieve at least his "my documents" folder. The computer was running XP. I did a little googling(tm) of my own to find out that the most recommended solution out there seems to be 'freezing' the harddrive for a day in a ziplock bag. I'd like to know what fellow Slashdot readers have done in the past to try and resurrect dead harddrives and if the freezing method would still be a good idea, today. The harddrive is a Samsung 30Gb." A good 95% of the time, once an HD is gone, break out the shovel, because it's time to bury it. Still, it would be interesting to note, if only from an anecdotal standpoint, if any of you have managed to perform such miracle hardware resurrections. Have you managed to revive a dead and decaying drive from the dead long enough to pull data off of it? If so, what did you do?
I had a dead drive that I kept around for a year just in case some miracle recovery cure came up. Sure enough I heard about the freezing thing and six months ago broke out the HD, stuck it in a plastic bag (in hopes of tricking any condensation into adhering to the other surface) and threw it in the freezer while I went and "prepped my system" for getting a drive in and fired up asap.
On the first attempt I had put the drive in the freezer for only about 20 minutes (hey, I was anxious) and it fired up. I browsed to the drive's directory before it crapped out on me, but I knew I was close. So the drive went back in the freezer while I thought of plan B.
On the Second attempt I left the drive chill for 45 minutes and this time when I took it out, I brought it out on a frozen gel pack. I was able to get all my data w/o condensation or other complications.
I'd like to say that my data was fine, but somewhere along the line my poetry and stories really started to really suck. It must have been corrupted at some point because I swear it was better when I wrote it. Hopefully your data will retain it's value...