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In older drives, a lot of failures were down to the heads actually getting stuck on the platters.

By freezing the drive, the metal would shrink just enough to unstick the head. Of course the location where the head crash had happened would be corrupt, but the rest of the data would be fine (mostly).

Yes, have used a similar technique of putting the drive in the freezer. Didn't believe it would work, surprised when it did.

I was watching Fringe at the time. I felt a bit like Walter interrogating a corpse while doing it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99Sk2ZnjGQA

“I need the body” is still a running gag between me and my partner.

My wife was very impressed with my ability to make dead disks talk.

I literally squeezed the data out of a drive once. 40M Connor, one of the first IDE drives. If I squeezed it too much, “Data Error, Abort, Retry, Ignore”. Too little? Same result. Just right? In like Flynn!

I spent 40 minutes copying that drive, got every bit back.

Boss asks, “What are you doing?”

“I’m milking the data out of this drive!” ;)