Don, I can't vouch for the "freezer" approach, but did, some years ago, have success by substantially cooling a malfunctioning hard drive and doing an immediate file recovery operation. If it were me, I would bag the unit with several containers of dried silica sand and put it in the fridge over night. Loosen the cover screws before-hand. Turn the a/c down in the room as far as you can stand it.
I'd be sure to have a full can of canned air for cooling and drying purposes. Next morning, I'd fire up the puter, fire up "SCSI Mounter", and put the 'puter to sleep. Then, I'd pull the drive out of the fridge, hook it up to the 'puter, lift off the cover, and turn it on. And if it made anything like a startup sound, I'd wake up the computer and use SCSI Mounter to attempt to mount it. I'd gently tap the mechanism with a screwdriver if the drive didn't appear to be winding up - and stop as soon as it showed any signs of life. Then, if the drive mounted, I'd copy my most critical files first - in the fastest way - preferably to an internal HD. If there is an option, it may be preferable to recover to an ATA/IDE drive (a HD or a zip) instead of another SCSI unit. While files were transferring, I'd use the canned air to keep the unit cool and to counteract any visible signs of condensation on the control board. Then, if I were successful, I'd swear to implement a routine backup program so that the next time I had a hard drive fail it would only be an inconvenience. This, incidentally, I did after that failure some years ago, and it made my second HD failure, last year, tolerable. > From: Dan Crutcher <dcrutcher at loumag.com> > Reply-To: macgroup at erdos.math.louisville.edu > Date: Sun, 21 Mar 2004 15:20:54 -0500 > To: macgroup at erdos.math.louisville.edu > Subject: MacGroup: Crashed hard drive > > A friend of mine has had what sounds like a hard drive crash of a LaCie > Tsunami external SCSI drive connected to a G3 Mac. She isn't sure > exactly what size the drive is; she says believes it's more than five > years old and in the 100-200 MB range. > > She says it made a "clicking" or "clunking" sound right before (or > when) it died. Now when plugged in and connected it emits several > beeps, the power light blinks red for a while and then goes solid > green, but it doesn't appear to spin up. > > She has several months of unbacked-up data on this drive and would > really like to be able to recover whatever is recoverable. She has > called several places that recover data, but they have estimated a cost > of $500-$1200 -- if it's even recoverable. That's more than she can > afford (or thinks the data is worth to her). > > Does anyone out there have any suggestions on: > > 1. Tricks she might try to get the drive to spin up at least one more > time so she can copy files off it? > 2. A lower-priced data recovery option? > > Thanks. > > Dan > > > > > | The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will > | be March 23. The LCS Web page is <http://www.kymac.org>. > | This list's page is <http://erdos.math.louisville.edu/macgroup>. > | The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will | be March 23. The LCS Web page is <http://www.kymac.org>. | This list's page is <http://erdos.math.louisville.edu/macgroup>.
