"Singing" failing hard drive - into the freezer?

Lmandrake · Post by **Lmandrake** » Fri Mar 13, 2009 9:53 am

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

wvjohn · Post by **wvjohn** » Fri Mar 13, 2009 9:56 am

"sounds" like it

TheSovereign · Post by **TheSovereign** » Fri Mar 13, 2009 10:06 am

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.

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Fri Mar 13, 2009 10:07 am

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.

normalicy · Post by **normalicy** » Fri Mar 13, 2009 1:13 pm

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).

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Fri Mar 13, 2009 2:46 pm

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.

Executioner · Post by **Executioner** » Fri Mar 13, 2009 7:14 pm

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.