Jul 0801
Cryogenics for the Terminally Dead Hard Drive
This topic is certainly not new. In fact, I first read about it many years ago, didn’t really believe it, but I must have filed the info in the old brain drive.
Last week, I went to pick up my son from his preschool. As soon as I walked in, the preschool Director came up to me, surprisingly calm for the news she was about to deliver. She said “My computer won’t boot ever since the power outage last week. Can you help?” She had a back-up of her work, but it was not current. (Rule number one: keep a current back-up of your PC and network.)
I told my husband, the “real techie in the family,” about the dead computer and he agreed to look at it. The prognosis was not good. The machine would not even recognize the drive, which was clicking sadly away. A senior network administrator came up with the same, bad news. Diagnostic tests would not revive the hard drive, either.
I was resigned to tell the preschool Director the sad news, when I remembered the urban legend about putting a dead drive in the freezer to revive it. I told my husband, who looked at me funny, but heck, we had nothing to lose.
