I have tried this technique and it had worked for me. It worked on maybe one or two drives, but there have been some drives that it had not revived.
I guess the theory behind this is that cooling causes things to shrink, and different materials shrink faster than others. If the drive is experiencing some sort of mechanical malfunction, sometimes cooling it will change the internals enough to let the drive initialize and work for some time. One of the drives I tried it with worked for several hours afterwards.. then went back to the click of death upon the next reboot. Another drive that we had at work (some proprietary SCSI plug, etc) just wouldn't spin up anymore. So we froze that, and it worked for maybe about 2 more years before it croaked. On Wed, 2005-06-22 at 20:47 -0400, Peter Teuben wrote: > > There is a random wive's tale (geek tale?) that says if you put a > disk > > in a freezer for a while, let it freeze, then hook it up, you can > get it > > to work for long enough to get your data off of it. I had one > friend try > > it, and apparently it worked, while it failed to work for another > friend. > > yuck,i hate it when i post something cute and i don't read ahead... > but > at least we had the same story! > > > If you do end up trying it, lemme know how it works ;-) > > I actually did try it , and i can unhappily report it didn;t work. > Mine > actually just clicked, as if it didn't want to start to spin.... >
