freezing hard drives

[Uranium-235]

incase none of you are aware. I happen to live in Mansfield, TX. Which, 5 mins away from me, is mouser headquarters. I did home computer work for one of thier inventory employees and he says that successful freezing of a HD (something he has never heard of) indicates a failed component on the controller board itself.

so successful freeze mean controller board replacement = good hard drive?

any idea?

this guy used to work on real IC's and electronics back in the day. Also IC development

[brethin]

Re: freezing hard drives

No, freezing can sometimes temporarily recover a drive from a mechanical problem but not a electrical one. Freezing a HD can sometimes works when the heads have become stuck to the platters or the armiture gets stuck and the drive fails to spinup or seek on the platters. The freezing causes the mechanical parts to contract and sometimes break free. This is the only usefull purpose to freezing a hard drive.

[Mad_Professor]

Re: freezing hard drives

No, freezing can sometimes temporarily recover a drive from a mechanical problem but not a electrical one. Freezing a HD can sometimes works when the heads have become stuck to the platters or the armiture gets stuck and the drive fails to spinup or seek on the platters. The freezing causes the mechanical parts to contract and sometimes break free. This is the only usefull purpose to freezing a hard drive.

Not all the time. I had acouple of Fujitsu drives around 2002, that had a defect that result in a decaying IC chip after being exposed to humidity, voltage and temperature, which cause the chip to short.

When the drive was running it would be fine until it got hot which would be about 2 minutes, then the drive would drop out and not able to be detected via windows or bios.

I manged to recover the the data using a tupperware container of iced water and a ziplock bag with some tape and submerged the drive. It worked great and got everything off within in an hour.

So it depends.

This method should only be the second to last resort type thing.

[Aikiotto]

Re: freezing hard drives

Howdy! ive had similar experience with Mad Professor and an indicative that cold might help you is that your drive is usable for a few seconds or minutes and then your data rate drops sharply or it just ceases to work at all.

In my case it were a couple of patients with failing MCU on the controller board and another with a dodgy VCM controller.

If you have a drive wich clicking sounds from the start wich isnt recognized by bios , i would not waste my time with the freezer trick since its most probably a HSA issue and it will require a clean room and some fancy tools and skills to replace it , as well as a proper donor drive.

Ive found data recovery to be the most complex of IT fields and it requires quite an investment to get good enough tools to start , so i would rather pay to a DR proffesional rather than take chances or play with my data!.

Just my toughts.

[Radio Fox]

Re: freezing hard drives

No, freezing can sometimes temporarily recover a drive from a mechanical problem but not a electrical one. Freezing a HD can sometimes works when the heads have become stuck to the platters or the armiture gets stuck and the drive fails to spinup or seek on the platters. The freezing causes the mechanical parts to contract and sometimes break free. This is the only usefull purpose to freezing a hard drive.

Sometimes components fail when they reach a certain temperature. I have found the fault on many circuit boards in the past with a can of freezer.

[kc8adu]

Re: freezing hard drives

yes there are a very few failures where cooling the drive will keep it going long enough to copy the data.did this to a ton of kalok/xebec drives to recover them.those were the yugo of hdd's back in the day....

[Topcat]

Re: freezing hard drives

I've done this many times in the past to recover data from a failing drive....its hit or miss, but many times it has saved someone's data.