[Coco] Drive freezing / data reovery (WAS: Re: Need to know if I'm in safe waters here)

[Joel Ewy]

Rod Barnhart wrote:
> On 8/3/07, Brian Blake <random_rodder at yahoo.com> wrote:
>   
>> Yeah, I'm sure the condensation from thawing, both inside and outside the HD would play havoc with the drive electronics, not to mention the platters and R/W heads inside...
>>     
>
> Probably. Fairly recently I had a couple of drives with data I would
> have liked to have saved, but wasn't worth taking to an expert. So I
> tried a couple of the urban legends. Freezing one of the drives did
> absolutely nothing to recover it, and probably lowered the chances of
> success by a data recovery service, should I have decided to have gone
> that route next. I'm sure this method worked for someone, once, a long
> time ago. But the likelihood of repeated success with it is slim to
> none.
>
>   
I just recently tried the freezer trick for the first time on a drive
that wouldn't spin up -- and this is one of the few situations where I
would think it would have much likelihood of success.  Shipping the
drive off to a data recovery place was out of the question for cost
reasons.  Had I not tried this, the drive and its data would have been
plopped in the trash.  The person I was doing it for had already written
it off as lost.  This was strictly last-ditch.  The drive hadn't spun up
for me, or for somebody else who'd looked at it before.  I froze it
overnight, then put it on a USB IDE interface.  It spun right up, and I
was able to copy all her important data. 

Emboldened by that success, I thought I would try cloning the entire
drive onto her new one, to avoid having to re-install M$-Windows and all
her software.  Without re-cooling the drive, other than allowing it to
cool to the ambient temperature on its own, I put both the bad drive and
her new one into a spare PC and started up a bootable drive cloning CD. 
It got to the 44% mark before the bad drive crapped out.  After that, no
amount of re-freezing would resurrect it.

So, in my (still quite limited) experience with this particular
practice, I would say that it rises well above the level of "urban
legend," but falls well short of "cure-all".  I concur that if you want
to  reserve the possibility of sending it to a professional, you should
absolutely not try this trick.  I think the condensation issue is
something to be concerned about.  Anything you could possibly achieve by
freezing the drive (that you couldn't achieve by other means) is likely
to be temporary, and may well come at the cost of further damage to the
drive.

I would definitely not try this trick for things like a corrupt
partition table, or really any data recovery issue where the drive still
spins and can still be seen by the PC's BIOS.  The only time to try a
stunt like this is when you have a drive that seems to have a physical
issue (stuck spindle motor bearing, or stuck head assembly) but no
obvious damage to the drive electronics, and it's the last thing you do
before opening the drive up to harvest the magnets. Do it if you've got
nothing to lose.  Don't do it if you have any intention of sending it to
a professional.

I haven't heard enough about what Briza's problem was, other than that
he had a bad interface cable.  But that does not sound to me like
something where freezing would be of any help at all.  If the bad cable
garbled the data on the disk, freezing won't help.  If the bad cable
toasted the controller board, freezing won't help.  And in either case,
there is undoubtedly some risk of destroying the data and making further
recovery attempts impossible.

Briza, does the PC's BIOS detect the drive?  Can you hear / feel the
motor turning?

To sum up:  Freezing a drive can sometimes, temporarily, work around
some kinds of otherwise fatal hard drive failures (stuck mechanical
parts, possibly overheating electronic components (though in the latter
case, maybe a heat sink / fan, or refrigerant spray would be a better
approach)), and give you one last chance to extract your data.  Plan
ahead about how to triage your data recovery, so you get the most
important stuff first.  You may not have much time, because whatever it
was that was causing the problem will almost certainly get worse again,
probably soon.  Use this method only after you have built your hard
drive's (and data's) casket and ordered the flowers for its funeral, and
only if you can't detect the drive in the PC's BIOS, or the drive
manufacturer's diagnostic utility says there's a problem with the
spindle motor or a stuck head assembly.  Finally, without knowing all
the facts, I have strong doubts that Briza's problem would be addressed
by freezing.  First download the drive manufacturer's diagnostic
utility, and see what it says, if you haven't already.  There are lots
of other things you can do before making a drive-sickle.

JCE