Hard drive blues.

Gosh. The past week had been gru­elling, stren­u­ous, labo­ri­ous, painstak­ing, plus all those adjec­tives you can think of that belong in that same page.

Why? Cos last week, my 2-year-old 160GB exter­nal hard disk drive decided to freak­ing die. Drag­ging along with it 6 years worth of about 15,000 fam­ily pho­tos and my freak­ing 50GB mp3 col­lec­tion I had since 2002.

Now who wouldn’t freak out?

160Gig HDD dead

Noth­ing worked. I tried every­thing a human could think of to revive the tick­ing hard drive, send­ing it for pro­fes­sional data recov­ery was obvi­ously ruled out due to high-cost, I scoured online forums for solu­tions but noth­ing worked. Until I remem­bered awhile back read­ing of a pro­posed method to revive a dead HDD by, drum­roll please… FREEZING IT.

Fin­ished laugh­ing? C’mon. I was des­per­ate, okay? And yeah, it was pro­posed that by lit­er­ally freez­ing your dead HDD in a freak­ing real house­hold freezer, a dead drive would come back to life. Now how cool (pun not intended. XD) is that?

Fujitsu laptop HDD

So I decided in des­per­a­tion to try out that wacky idea, but first, on our late Sony Vaio’s dead HDD (well it died awhile after I res­cued all data off it in that post). Since its dead and worth­less, might as well be my lab rat. =D

It was pointed out in the drive-freezing dis­cus­sions that they have to be secured in a ziplock bag before con­demn­ing them into the icy-cold hell our daily seafood and meat­stuff expe­ri­ence each day.

So I dug around and found these Tesco reseal­able food bags my dad got in KL awhile ago.

Tesco ziplock bags

Per­fect. Just what I wanted. So I stuff the old drive into it, zipped it up air­tight and secure to pre­vent con­den­sa­tion, and dump it into the freezer.

Freezing laptop HDD

After wait­ing impa­tiently for 2 hours, I took it out. In the dis­cus­sions, sug­ges­tions for the freez­ing dura­tion var­ied from an hour to a whole week. I thought an hour might be too short, so maybe two will do.

I took the drive out from the ziplock bag, wrap rolls of tis­sue around it, plugged it into my lap­top, lo and behold.. noth­ing hap­pened. It was still an icy-cold dead drive.

So much for that urban myth eh. I ended up get­ting more des­per­ate and decided in a rash to pro­ceed with another freez­ing attempt, this time — on the real thing.

160Gig HDD in bag

This is it. 6 years worth of price­less mem­o­ries caught on cam­era in that metal case. This either works, or risk the drive get­ting wet out of con­den­sa­tion and caus­ing fatal short cir­cuits, con­demn­ing the drive and every­thing in it forever.

I had no choice.

160Gig HDD in freezer

Try it, or its just a dead drive with noth­ing you can do.

This time, I took no chances, I left the drive in the freezer overnight and into the morn­ing for a whole 15 hours.

160Gig HDD wrapped

Next morn­ing, I repeat every­thing I did with the old drive only this time I was extra cau­tious, and used a kitchen towel to get rid of all that nasty condensation.

I pow­ered up every­thing, sat there and prayed.

For what felt like for­ever, it began click­ety click­ing. Then after about 5 min­utes, it mirac­u­lously hummed to life. OMG.

160Gig HDD condensation

Vista detected it imme­di­ately. But unfor­tu­nately none of the recov­ery soft­ware I had worked, PC Inspec­tor etc. refused to load at all, even Explorer itself crashes. I had to resort to using the old and faith­ful com­mand prompt to do all the copying.

With that, I repeated the freeze and res­cue cycle for every­day in the past week. Each time, the icy cold drive gave me about 3–4 hours of copy­ing before it warms up and start its click­ety click­ing again.

To date, I had recov­ered some 11GB of pho­tos and 21GB of mp3s and count­ing. The mp3s were OK, but a minor­ity of the pho­tos were cor­rupted. I would put the fig­ure at about 95% on recov­ery rates.

Still laugh­ing? =P

Next time you have a dead drive, you know what to do. =D But of course, you need not be like me and go through all that trou­ble, for a bet­ter advice from me would be to BACKUP YOUR IMPORTANT DATA WEEKLY. No wait, I should grab a mir­ror and shout that at myself. =\

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Edit: I realised that in a hurry to fin­ish the post I kinda for­got to cover two things. First was how the first freez­ing attempt didn’t work. My deduc­tions would be that that old drive was screwed up beyond repair (psst, I found it among a stack of sta­tionery) but if the mechan­ics inside were still intact with all that knock­ing, then the short dura­tion of freez­ing could be blamed. Maybe a mere 2 hours isn’t enough to do the magic. =P

Sec­ond is how the whole freez­ing thing works. It def­i­nitely sounds far-fetched as a fix for dead hard dri­ves. I’m no hard disk dude and have no idea of the physics behind this trick but I’ve read a detailed expla­na­tion by an engi­neer about the freez­ing trick some­where. Can’t seem to find it any­more though. =\

24 thoughts on “Hard drive blues.

  1. ember

    Well it started tick­ing out of the blue and XP would crash every­time I try access it. Maybe its also worth men­tion­ing that the cas­ing was much warmer than usual that day. Over­heat­ing perhaps?

    RAW? Haha. I ain’t no pro­fes­sional pho­tog­ra­pher (yet) hehe. Guess you are then? Wanna share some pics? xD

    I love admir­ing pho­tos you guys with mighty dSLRs take. =P

  2. Pingback: Memory of Memories - tehcpeng.net photography

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