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Has
your hard drive died? Do you need the data that is on it?
Put it in your Freezer.
No,
I have not gone mad. This is a tried and true method of data recovery.
Does this work?
Yes but not for all situations
Do I recommend it ?
Yes but with some caveats
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Firstly be aware about your
warranty. If you do this, you have none.
-
Try software recovery solutions
like Getdataback first. If this
fails, try the drive on a second PC with the same software. Often you
get different results.
-
If you can afford it and the data is
valuable enough, use a professional
Be careful with water. Some people
have external solutions (External to the Freezer) using ice baths, Dry
ice, Nitrogen and other crazy items. They put laptops into snow or run
insanely long USB and power cabled to machines hooked into fridges. Be
careful with water and electrical devices.
What are we talking about ?
People have been putting their Hard
Disks into
freezers for
years now, to help fix the issue
with the drive long enough to be able to recover their data. I
have personally done this so I know it works. Yes, you can see a hard disk
in my freezer along side frozen pizzas and peas. My clients data is
important and a few of their drives have been in my freezer along side my
disks.
Note: this is mainly for
mechanical related issues. It does not help
with major electrical issues (if
IC's are burnt out etc). It might help with some small electrical issues
with IC's but it is less likely.
Method
Firstly, the
right way. Use sealable bags. "Double
bag" The disk and squeeze out any air. Freeze for minimum of 4 - 6 hours.
The trick is to get the drive below 3 degrees centigrade and keep it there
for as long as possible. For every additional 72 hours of cooling I get
about 30 minutes more before the drive dies. I find freezing is pointless
after 1 week. I normally bag just the drive itself, not the assembly. I have
tried it with Parallel and power Molex cables attached but it did not really
save any time. Time is the enemy here. The Frozen drive will defrost very
quickly.
Then you could always do it the
wrong way. An ICE brick attached to your PC. The best way I have seen this
done is by using an old blank CD/DVD spindle container lid, put in the
double bagged drive (Zip locks to the top). Pour water in around the drive
but not to the top. Once frozen, undo the zip locks and plug your ice cube
into the PC.
The aim is to keep the drive in the freezer and
frozen for as long as possible and that is what leads people to try other
ideas to keep drives cool. These ideas are not for the faint of heart.
There is the alternative suggestion of
surrounding Hard disks with a fluid, it better regulates the temperature
[laws of thermodynamics]. There are some suggestions that the easiest way to
make the 30 min window before the disk starts to thaw out last longer, is to
bring the freezer to the hard drive. Make a small fridge/igloo and use water
with salt (the salt lowers the melting point so it makes it colder).
Get a zip lock bag and set it in vertically with the cables coming out of
the top of the bag and tape it to the side of the igloo to where no water
can get in and the hard drive will work all day long or at least until you
run out of ice.
If after whatever form of
freezing you use, the drive does not work or the PC will not boot, try it
via a USB interface as well. Sometimes the USB caddies have enough metal in
them to keep the drives cool. My
recommendation is to not try to boot off a frozen drive. The drive is not
going to work for very long, so the idea is to copy as much data off it as
you can as fast as you can. Put it into a system as a slave.
What you could do is to put it in
an external enclosure (since being in your computer will heat it up faster)
and attach it to an already running machine. Then simply copy the
critical
data only as fast as possible. Sometimes
you even want to make batch files ahead of time to copy the most important
files first. You've literally only got minutes, but those minutes can be a
lifesaver when a drive dies unexpectedly.
There are many thoughts as
to why this works.
ome
metal parts in the hard disk could contract, putting back in place defective
parts, and making everything work again for a few minutes.
This could allow the disk
to spin more freely and it could likely boot correctly. Expansion/contraction of
platters also leads to changes of bit density and locations.
(shrink
the plates)
Hard drives store information via
magnetic materials that polarize North or South in tiny areas
representing a logical 1 or 0. All magnetic materials are temperature
dependent, their magnetic field grows stronger or weaker with
temperature (depending on the type of material). The recording media in
hard drives becomes magnetically stronger as it cools. The signal picked
up by the read head is "louder" in a frozen hard drive, helping the read
head pick up a partially corrupted, or possibly weak signal. I'm not
sure if this is why freezing a hard drive allows it to live again until
it warms, but the fact the magnetic media increases flux density when
cold may be one contributing reason.
There is a
vacuum in the hard disk and
sometimes dust particles get in the drive. By putting it in the freezer,
the dust sticks to the surface. (See the note below under false
information)
This leaves Bi-metal expansion, "The physics", Thermodynamics, and cushions of air.
Don't also forget the
Curie point in
ferromagnetic materials
What issues can this get around ?
Track Zero Failure
There is often
a clacking noise when you get a track 0 failure. Generally one platter in an
IDE Hard Drive contains offset information. By
reading this platter the armature can tell where exactly it is in relation
to the platters. When you loose the ability to read this offset platter for
whatever reason, the armature will try to seek a specific offset and end up
banging against the inside of the drive case as it seeks right past the outside
of the platter, or track 0.
The reason that freezing works, is that when a head
crashes it gets off center and will hit the pin the hard drive. Freezing it
compresses it, allowing it to gain a little room to move where it wouldn't
before.
Hard disk not spinning
As the plates shrink, they can move freely
after freezing.
Bad sectors
Hard drives can overheat
during the continuous read cycle that data recovery involves. Logically,
this means that the drive will respond better with added cooling. If the
fault is caused by floating dust, the dust sticks to the platters and the
data can be read.
IC failure
Integrated circuits
sometimes partially fail, and if you can keep a chip cold enough it will
still work. Putting a drive in the freezer only helps if you have a
*partially* fried chip on the board
"stiction" (sp)
where some of the
platters actually get fused together. They are made
of different materials so they expand/contract at different rates when
subjected to temperature extremes, so the hard drive works again, for a while.
False Information
The drive contains a vacuum:
The heads float on a cushion of air created by the
spinning of the platters, hence the reason for the little holes on the hard
drive enclosure.
If the drive was in a vacuum it would crash since the heads
actually ride on a layer of air without the air they
would grind into the platters
Freezing causes
condensation:
Condensation is what happens when you put the
drive in a warm, moisture-rich environment after it's been in the freezer.
It doesn't happen in the freezer!
Other information
RAID failure
I have read about an interesting situation where
someone had a failed RAID and tried the freezer and it still caused the POST
sequence to fail
when detecting IDE
as before the Freezer trick.
It was dynamic disk that had been striped in windows.
He then booted windows and plugged the drive in through a USB adapter and it
worked perfectly for long enough to get his data off it. Windows detected it
instantly and re-activated the striped disks.
Other comments on cooling
Often hard drive failures are a result of
overheating. Placing a heat sink / fan combination from an old cpu can
often help the drive run long enough to recover information off of it.
Other - Stuck heads
Another trick (for
those not faint of heart) if your
hard disk head is stuck, hit the corner with a hammer.
Freezing
CDR
This trick
has been reported, oddly enough, to not only works with
semi-broken hard disks but also with cd-rs and cd-rws which have scratches all over
them. I believe this is due to the matter of the drive contracting and thus
closing spaces which cause loss of data.
Software repair faulty Track Zero
Use the Trial ver. of
HDDREGENERATOR
This application repairs crucial
bad
sectors (usually the 1st on the HDD
or track Zero).
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