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Creative Data Loss

Posted by timothy on from the do-it-just-like-not-this dept.

lewiz writes "An interesting article from the BBC about the crazy things people do when they accidentally delete files. Amazingly one guy froze his hard disk in an effort to retrieve files. Real men don't make backups... but, hell, who needs to if you can resurrect them from the dead ;)"

9 of 350 comments (clear)

  1. What's wrong with freezing a drive? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    At least for a little bit? It's helped me recover data from other dead drives a number of times.

    1. Re:What's wrong with freezing a drive? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      The blurb is misleading (retrieve could mean undelete or recover from a dead hard drive). The actual story says "One user put his hard drive in a freezer, after reading on the internet that this can fix malfunctioning hardware." Of course, the source is Ontrack who would love to sell you their data recovery.

    2. Re:What's wrong with freezing a drive? by TheOtherChimeraTwin · · Score: 3, Informative
      From the article: One user put his hard drive in a freezer, after reading on the internet that this can fix malfunctioning hardware

      Yes, you can fix some hardware problems by cooling the electronics. Now, this would be silly if the user accidently deleted the files and then froze the drive to undelete them. Otherwise, this can be a reasonable approach, even if it sounds silly to a BBC journalist.

      Going to a professional recovery service immediately without mucking about is much better, but the expense of the data needs to outweight the cost of the recovery.

  2. Freezing a hard disk by Zog+The+Undeniable · · Score: 4, Informative

    Isn't total bollocks, as we say in Britain. The Fujitsu drives that were failing a couple of years ago could sometimes be revived long enough to back them up using this method. The fault was in the drive electronics, not the physical disk.

    --
    When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
  3. Re:Hard Drive in the Freezer by wirelessbuzzers · · Score: 5, Informative

    If the drive was stictioned, depending on the lubricant, a decent way to rescue it might be

    1) Heat the drive above room temperature. I'm not saying boil it; I put one of those chemical hand-warmers on mine and left it in a box for a while. This should heat it to around 40C.

    2) Connect it to your computer, but leave the drive itself out on a desk. May require some monkeying with your case to let it run while open.

    3) Turn the computer on. If the drive still clicks when it tries to spin up, tap it on the corner (in a way that would spin the drive if you hit it harder). The idea is to provide some torque to break the static friction of the lubricant and get it spun up.

    I rescued (part of) a hard drive this way last year. I didn't get all the data off it, but at least I managed to retrieve /, /var and /etc. The /usr partition got read errors, possibly due to my whacking the disk.

    --
    I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
  4. Why you stick a hard drive in the freezer.... by Kymermosst · · Score: 3, Informative

    Sheesh I feel old, all you kids here on Slashdot don't even know about stiction.

    This really isn't a problem on modern drives, but in the past it would happen. Something that would work to unstick the drive head was to stick the drive into the freezer. This would (presumably by a slight contraction of the platters) allow the drive to spin up. Once the drive was warmed up and spinning, you could then proceed to back up as much of the data as possible before the drive failed.

    Now, it's highly unlikely that the person mentioned in the FA had a drive that was suffering from stiction. Modern drives rarely have this problem.

    More info here. (Warning: PDF)

    --
    "Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
  5. Freezing can help by imsabbel · · Score: 4, Informative

    for example the thermal shrinking can free heads sticking to the discs (the IBM problem). Or cold solder connections can work again.
    Its no repair, but a good trick to try to get the drive running for a hour or two to backup everything.

    --
    HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
  6. Re:The freezer trick does work though by Cprossu · · Score: 3, Informative

    there are two major ways freezing can help 1) by cooling the electronics package, pathways that have been messed up will conduct electricity and 2) by cooling the platters, a stuck spindle/head problem can be resolved by the contracting of the metal or mylar coated platters since that moves the heads away from the platters just enough that the hdd can spin up.

  7. Google Desktop Search to the rescue by ZeroTrace · · Score: 5, Informative
    I found myself in a predicament a few weeks ago where I had just finished adding three pages to a term paper and went to back it up to my USB drive. Needless to say, I somehow managed to delete the file and corrupt the copy on the USB drive. As I was frantically thinking about solutions I glanced down at the taskbar clock to see how much time I had before it was due.

    At this point one of my tray icons caught my attention... Google Desktop Search. I had been playing with it for a few days and remembered the caching functionality. I opened it up and did a search for the file. Magically, it appeared with a cache and the entire document, in all of it's glory.

    This was proof enough for me that aside from the security concerns, desktop search tools do have distinct advantages. Especially instant backups :)