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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 ;)"

5 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.

  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. 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.

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    HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
  5. 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 :)