Comments on: Cryogenics for the Terminally Dead Hard Drive

By: Jason

Jason — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 03:25:52 +0000

I’ve never used the plastic bag. Condensation is going to form on the drive once it warms up whether you have it in a plastic bag or not. Just wipe it off with paper towel before powering it up. It shouldn’t be an issue as condensation is distilled water and it’s non-conductive.

By: Jason

Jason — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 03:15:16 +0000

I’ve used this technique since before my 15 years in the computer industry. I started placing bad drives in the freezer as young adult out of amusing physics concepts. It’s quite noticeable that HHDs that are going bad read less reliably as they become warm and assessed moving metal parts were expanding past spec.

The theory is freezing a HHD that’s out of tolerance which has track seek issues (the typical kurchunk problem) would cause metal components to contract and bring the read heads back into alignment with the platters and a readable state long enough to retrieve data. If the drive becomes too warm under use the moving components will expand and bring the drive out of spec again and needs to be refrozen. It works about 2/3 of the time if the issue is mechanical.

There are times when the drive is so far out of tolerance that freezing will not contract metal components enough to read the data. It doesn’t always work, but a good portion of the time you can retrieve some information.

By: Gav

Gav — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 23:41:23 +0000

I’ve done this a few times with some success, however it only works for certain hard drive problems.

By: Jay

Jay — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 19:03:51 +0000

This technique will work in certain situations. I have used it several times to recover data from failed hard drives, when all other attempts proved fruitless, and usually after a ‘senior’ or ‘experienced’ technician has deemed the drive a ‘lost cause.’ However, it is never a sure thing, because as many times as it has worked for me, there are an equal number of times where it hasn’t. That is why I can’t agree with you more about how important data backups are, even for the casual user. Every person I helped with this technique I have also trained on how to back up their data so I would (hopefully) never have to try to recover data again.

By: AlexM

AlexM — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 17:11:02 +0000

Your blog is interesting!

Keep up the good work!

By: advisor

advisor — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 00:02:47 +0000

Now this I’ve got to try. Does it clean the toilet too? Now that would be worth it even if chewed my DVD!

By: Joanna Pineda

Joanna Pineda — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 15:51:16 +0000

Wow, I ***never*** would have thought to flush my DVDs down the toilet. Sounds scary, but if you say it doesn’t hurt the DVDs, then I will try it next time I have a DVD that skips. Have you tried it with Blu-Ray disks? Those are expensive and I would hate to ruin one. Thanks for the tip!

By: Sara

Sara — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 13:39:33 +0000

This is a great one to file away, thanks!

Another weird-but-it-worked-for-me tip: if you have a movie DVD that keeps skipping in your DVD player, and you’ve cleaned it and that hasn’t worked, try dropping it in the toilet bowl and flushing, and then once it’s been flushed, pull it out, dry it, and put it back in your DVD player. I’ve done it six or eight times, and in about half the cases it cleared up the problem, and it’s certainly never made the problem worse. Worth a try!