On 06/17/2014 01:01 PM, Alex @ Call the Ninja wrote:
I cannot stress enough how important it is that you not do the freezer trick. Only do it if you have decided not to pursue professional recovery and have tried every other recovery operation available. Freezing drives causes condensation to build up on the drive platter and often causes un-fixable damage to the drives. Many data recovery places won't even accept freezer-trick drives. It rarely ever works (though I can say I have successfully used it on one of dozens of drives I have tried it with personally).
I can't even begin to count how many times I begged customers not to try the freezer trick when I was doing top tier support at Western Digital. I even did have someone say "But I'm going to put it in a zip-lock bag to prevent condensation."
It was never my impression that this made drives unacceptable to data recovery firms, but I did warn that the amount of condensation meant this this was a last-effort, one-time kind of thing that was very likely to fail.
Basically the only thing the "freezer trick" would fix is frozen bearings--if that was indeed the case, which it usually *wasn't*. Of course, Western Digital drives have used liquid bearings for so long that I never took a call for a drive that didn't have them. (Except the one call I got for a 120 MB hard drive. That was fun--he just needed jumper settings.)
As an aside, I once audited a German-language call where the caller was a computer repair shop who received 3 returns for drives that "sounded like they had sand in them when you tilted them". In the call translation, the support agent put the customer on hold to speak with a manager, and then came back and said "That's perfectly normal. Those are small beads that protect against dust and electrostatic discharge. There's a small chamber inside the drive that contains them."
At that point I immediately pulled the original call recording and listened to it because I knew there had to be some kind of translation error. Nope, "kleines Kügelchen" and "besondere Kammer" were unambiguous. Needless to say, the audit score wasn't particularly high on that call. ;)
Regards, Nathan -- Nathan Haines Ubuntu - http://www.ubuntu.com/ -- Ubuntu-us-ca mailing list [email protected] Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-us-ca
