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Cool dead hard drive trick

Discussion in 'Anything goes' started by The Big Ragu, Jul 8, 2009.

  1. The Big Ragu

    The Big Ragu Moderator Staff Member

    A hard drive in a Macbook that I use for work went dead. I make backups with Time Machine, so nothing major was lost, but there were still a few things I wanted to salvage before scrapping the drive, which hadn't made it into my last backup. I tried everything and the drive wouldn't spin, wasn't recognized by OS X's disk utility, and wouldn't boot the computer.

    A new 160 gig SATA drive only cost $45, without a ton of shopping around for price because I needed it immediately, so the damage wasn't that bad. And I was able to restore the machine from a Time Machine backup, so I didn't lose that much time getting it set up again.

    But I still had a few things--a small handful of documents, photos, e-mails, that hadn't made it onto my last backup, though. Someone suggested I freeze the drive. And very surprisingly t worked. I put it in the freezer for a few hours, quickly put it back in the machine and it bought me about 20 minutes to pull some stuff off the drive before it stopped spinning again.

    I thought I'd share the freezer trick, because I know occasionally we have "my drive went bad" threads on here. It's definitely worth a try if you have a drive stop spinning. From what I understand, it won't salvage the drive permanently, but for some reason it will sometimes buy you a short amount of time to pull stuff off it. That is exactly what happened for me.
     
  2. mustangj17

    mustangj17 Active Member

    Dwight put a dead cat in the freezer once.

    Oh wait, that's the wrong thread.
     
  3. Flip Wilson

    Flip Wilson Well-Known Member

    Fixed.
     
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