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Comment by SOLAR_FIELDS | Hacker News Reader

That sickening click sound that a disk drive makes when it's on the verge of failure is ingrained in my head.

I tried putting one of those in the freezer once, and maybe it was a folk remedy, but it worked enough to boot and get my data off!

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That must be one of the silliest hacks I've ever heard, right up there with oven-baking electronics to fix loose solder joints. I love it!

As a teen I managed to 'rescue' 1000's of £/$'s worth of graphics cards from eBay listed as spares/repair with this method. I recall this working about half the time; then again at least 3/10 cards from eBay listed as broken worked immediately when plugged in.

Did you have any "signals" you looked for on the listings to indicate they might just need an oven reflow, or did you just buy everything cheap and hope it worked?

Reminds me of the old Xbox 360 "red ring of death" fix where you could just wrap the box in towels and leave it running for an hour to overheat it, then reboot and it would work again.

Very recently I was able to get a bootlooping N5X to temporarily boot, long enough to recover pictures, by putting it in to the freezer for a couple of hours. Some folks have (claimed to have) had long term success from freezing the bootlooping devices.

Not OP, but I have had the freezer trick work more times than not. It's a last case type of deal, but when there's nothing to lose try it. Just make sure the drive is sealed up nicely.

Worked in HS for a local computer repair shop. One trick to improve success with the freezer method is to place the drive in a sealed plastic bag with some desiccant packs. Placing a bare drive in the freezer can kill it due to condensation. Leave the drive in the bag at least a few hours to give the desiccant time to work. Like others have said, this is a last ditch effort, and if you really care enough, don't do it if you are willing to send it to a specialist, since it can ruin a recoverable drive. But it does seem to work ~30% of the time (at least w/ deathstars) and I did have success on a clicking Seagate drive last year.

It works because of how hard drives work - the heads are extended by slightly heating the bar the heads are connected to. If you're head crashing, you need a little less length, hence freezer.

This isn't quite true, the heads are kept from crashing by air pressure and a crash does irreversible damage. The "clicking" sound is either the heads flicking back and forth as the drive tries to seek, or the central motor trying and failing to start platters spinning which are jammed on the bearing.

What freezing the drive may achieve is either un-sticking it from the bearings (see also the "bang drive on edge" technique), or lowering the thermal noise floor in the electronics enough for marginal components to make it through the boot sequence.

When I worked for a small computer place years and years ago we'd sometimes "tap" a drive as it was spinning up if freezing it didn't work. Tapping it with a screw driver handle rarely worked, but it was always a last ditch effort to save having to send a drive out -- which most people wouldn't pay for anyway.

I did that with a drive in my computer fairly recently. Although I didn't so much tap it as shake it on startup. It did finally start spinning enough to insure that I had the last few bits of data transferred to a new drive, though. :)

While they may make legitimate points in the article, it's hard to consider someone that makes money on HDD recovery like the authors of the article having an unbiased viewpoint here.

Ah, interesting! Thanks for the correction. I was off the project before we put in the drives obviously. ;)

There was a type of Seagate drive long ago (I believe mine was a 2GB) that would stop working, apparently because the spindle got stuck. But if you shook it in a rotational manner, it would unstick! The first time I sent it for warranty service and of course they deleted all my data. But the next time it happened I learned about the trick.

I can confirm the freezer trick worked too. This was back before multi-platter high density drives though. I tried it recently with a failed 6TB drives from a friend, and it didn't work.

Yeah this was many years ago. I think the one I did it with was a 250GB from the mid to late 2000's

It definitely works. I just did it a couple of years ago.

In fact, no matter how long I left it in the freezer, I couldn't get all the data off. I ended up freezing it in the freezer, then putting it in a small cooler with a couple ice packs, with the wires hanging out between the cooler and lid. That gave me just enough to grab all the data (well, really, a couple of not-so-small VHDX files).

It was much fun, like a science experiment in high school.

You may be interested in this interesting archive of hdd-failing-sounds. Note: as it's about 10 years old, it requires flash. http://datacent.com/hard_drive_sounds.php

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