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My girlfriend's hard drive is failing - makes a whining sound when spins up. Sometimes it attempts to boot windows but doesn't, other times doesn't boot - just "error reading drive c:". I want to try to get as much data off it as I can before it fails completely.

Is this drive a candidate for the freezer trick?

Thanks

"sounds" like it

if its whining the bearing is shot if it spins at all you have a chance, the problem occurs when the vibration is high enough to cause head to damage the surface.

Freezer trick is absolute last resort. It doesn't work often, and once you get some moisture in the drive it's all over anyway.

I would try copying as much as you can as is, but don't boot from it. Connect it as a spare to another PC - preferably using a USB interface so that when it stops working you can just power the drive down and restart it to coax some more data off it.

Let it cool completely down (over night). Then try to use it the next day. If you can read anything, grab a gigabyte of info if you can. If that works, go for broke on a few more. If it fails, turn it off quick & let it cool off again (multiple hours). I've saved a few this way. The freezer trick never worked for me (tried on probably 5 drives).

Freezer never worked for me either. Normalicy's trick (grabbing a bit, letting it cool down if it stops responding) is how I usually salvage client data.

I honestly think the freezer trick only used to ever work on drives that were suffering from stiction, but stiction has been eliminated for nearly 10 years now.

The freezer tricked has worked for me once, but on one occasion, I used a heat gun to make one work long enough to get data off.