This also works with the iPhone.

i've heard of freezing hard drives to get them working one last time; not sure if that is any less crazy than boiling them. i tried the freezer once, no luck though.

some porn is too valuable to risk like that.

I gotta say that if it came down to it and I didn't have anything too important on there why not boil your hard drive?

The worst that could happen is that the drive that doesn't work anyway could be rendered completely worthless.

But I sure as hell wouldn't trust it to keep working for any length of time after boiling.

yeah and if the drive is killed take it apart and grab yourself a few supermagnets:)

I was told you could fix that problem with a simple whack while the hard drive is not running. However the only problem I had with a hard drive is when part of the circuit board on the hard drive blew up. Nothing was recovered.

Never heard of heating, but I read freezing is a well known way to get data off of a sick drive. You many need to refreeze the drive if it heats up before you collect all the data.

Also heard giving a sick drive a quick twist in the same plane as the platters spin helps, too.

Another rescue method is to get an identical, working drive and swap circuit boards.

Well, if it's already broken, you can't break it more...

I would think freezing the drive would be a lot safer than trying to heat it. If you overheat it, you're screwed (and any warranty left on the drive would obviously be voided). Freezing a drive doesn't leave any obvious physical signs, and it's always worked for me in the past.

Hmmm, interesting. I actually always heard the opposite;(clicking noise indicating a header crash) basically that freezing the drive might give it a chance of working(by packing it in dry ice for several hours) The cold would contract the disk platter separating the header from the platter. Donno if that is a myth or not.

@VenoMuS: That was some funny shit!

@Keonar: not a myth my moms bosses hard drive had 1 million dollars worth of data on it.. i saved it by sticking it on some dry ice for a day and pluging it in

@bandit:

ive never laughed that hard

Before someone tries this, it's important to keep in mind that the DRIVE is not boiled. Double boiling (for the people who don't cook) means placing the item you wish to cook into a small pot which is them placed into another, larger pot which has boiling water in it. So the item in the smaller pot is kept dry. This technique is commonly used for melting chocolate because the even, less intense heat keeps the chocolate from burning.

I wouldn't recommend actually boiling your hard drive. It makes me laugh though to imagine someone who's never heard of double boiling dropping the drive into a pot of boiling water twice after reading this.

You don't want to freeze the hard drive. The drive will develop condensation inside the HDA and it's not good at all. I know about this technique years ago but instead of double boiling, you were suppose to put it in an oven at low temperature for about 15 minutes. After that, you'd better get the data off the drive quickly because the initial problem will come back.

I used to work for disc drive companies and this is the last resort method that I used to tell people to try if nothing else worked. I wouldn't recommend it unless you have nothing to lose.

@eben: Hmmm well you could probably get that, but you could also be cautious and get it cold (on a plastic vacuum bag) then let it rest (it's the thermal change you want, not the drive working while frozen). This method has worked for me in the past (but i won't say it will work for you) and it just bought me some time to get to the files via DOS and copy them over to another HDD.

15 minutes on a low temperature oven???? Wouldn't that be even more harmful?

I've frozen drives with crashed heads...it was successful once to the tune of all of my files recovered. However, I got rid of the faulty drive afterwards. The big tip is to use an external USB case so as not to heat up the drive during boot.

Tried it again on my bosses personal drive, it didn't work out. Of course he is a dick, so I didn't try real hard.

"Thats hot"

The cooling method is not a myth. Though shock therapy, such as dry ice is not recommended. Just pop the drive in a plastic bag and pop that in the freezer- but you needn't do it all night. Sometimes hitting a drive with an inverted can of "air" is also a good quick fix.

As to this- it's suspect. If I really need the data, I'm either going to transfer the jewel (clean room or not) or I am going to pay for data recovery.

The thrust of this DIY is, "Back your data up!"

I'll personally vouch for the freezing method. A tech at work saved my life by leaving my hard drive (same clicking problem, head against the side of the case) in a freezer overnight. I was able to recover nearly all of my files.

I can confirm that freezing a drive works well. My drive started to "click" and was unusable. I placed it in a plasic bag, squeezed out most of the air, and left it in the freezer for 2 days. Its been working great ever since, 6 months now.

@alin0steglinski:
Good one.

I've tried the freezer method at least ten times (I work in an IT dept) with no luck. In every case though, the drive was at the clicking stage. I've never gotten so much as a byte of data off of a clicker and I've tried every method I could google. Dropping, tapping, freezing... nothing. Only DriveSavers has ever saved a clicker and we've had something like 100 bad drives come through my department.

What's wierd about this is that the text implies that the drive isn't even POSTing, which is a firmware issue, not heads and platters rattling 'round. My BS detector is spiking. A crashed drive should POST, just won't get past the BIOS screen, or give you a 'no OS found' prompt.

As for the freezing- it was on the clicking drives, the drive wouldn't even spin up all the way, kept clicking and spinning down. Put it in a ziplock, put that in a tupperware with some icepacks and left it in the freezer for days. Hooked up the USB/SATA adapter, kept the drive in the ziplock, covered by the icepacks. I got about 5 good minutes.

I put my Seagate in a slow cooker for 4 hours on High mixed in with some beef broth, carrots, potatoes, onions, a few cloves of garlic, and salt/pepper to taste. Srved it in a large bowl and was ready to go. The soup that eats like a meal!

i knew i should have saved my folks dead drive so i could try something retarded on it.

@bandit: ha!

@zarchitect: ha, ha! tastes like fish.

these fake how-to videos are way, way out of hand now. you cant seriously report this crap as news without a hint of confirmation. but hey at least you posted the debunked glowing mountain dew so you are not fooled by EVERY fake how-to video i guess.

@scifiwriter: THAT was only a good thing to try when you had stiction on old school MFM or RLL, or even ESDI hard drives. you know, the 5.25" ones that didn't park themselves and you had to have a little "park" command line utility to move the heads off the data area properly before you turnt it off.

Nowadays with these modern (IDE, Conner era) drives what automatically park themselves and all, with the first click of death fujitsus, the thing was to freeze 'em a bit (or maybe all day) them run the ide and power cables into the break room freezer and shut it again to get it to work long enough to copy off the important bits.

that or keep an identical drive around for spare parts for the data recovery company to use in worst case.

@alin0steglinski:

If there's truly a million bucks worth of data on the drive, then commercial data recovery service would be worth the cost. Backups would be cheaper of course...

@zarchitect:
Sounds tasty, although a small thin cut like that would probably work better on the grill after a nice long soak in marinade.

I know Computer Techs who've done something similar, they actually steam the drive. It world. So any numbtards who've written stupid comments above. GFYS!

@liquidsoapdispenser: yeah man, double kudos for the laugh today. And you're SO right.

On 2nd point, instead of 'double boiling' which I assume means NOT coming in contact with water, and DOUBLE therefore never getting above 212F (or approx that) why not build a little box with a hair dryer (sp?) on one end and outlet on other, HDD inside, cables all hooked up, etc etc et-f+"!ing-cetera, and start heating until HDD is giving you data again. Then, quickly do transfer of data to another HDD, and presto, your precious pron is safe once more (thank the demi gods of pron, namely Ron Jeremy and Dirk Diggler)

Hard Drive
Hard Drive with Haddock in a white wine sauce
Hard Drive Baked Beans sausage and SPAM...

@strider_mt2k: don't forget the side of zested and boiled cd from last week.

@VenoMuS: Then it should be backed up.

Which is why we need more robust cloud computing. Won't somebody think of the pronography?

I'm with the folks suggesting freezing... doesn't work every time, but it works most of the time.

I actually have a monitor that I sometimes bake! My guess is that it has a bad solder joint, because the back light only works when it is warmed up. I never turn it off anymore. So if the power ever goes out, I have to manually heat it up, which I accomplish by baking for 1 hour at 175F (the lowest my oven goes). I'm guessing the hard drive in question has a similar problem. The double boiler is unnecessary for this purpose, though, and only provides temperature regulation at the boiling point. Baking in an oven, though, can work at even a lower temperature. Food for thought!

My Drive Crashed and I put it in the Freezer for a night then plugged it in while it was still cold and had enough time to get all 40GB of data off of it. It had pictures and a sizable MP3 library.

Go to IT, IT calls you and you can't refuse.
When you've got no data, you've got no data to lose...

Hmm, I don't think anyone said "but will it blend" yet. Amazing.

I hear that microwaving your HDD for 45 seconds provides better results than double boiling it. No lies.

Seems to me a hair dryer/heat gun would have the same effect. I've frozen drives and got them up and running. They'd work for about an hour or three, enough to back them up.

Well all you freeze the hardrive naysayers repent. Since reading this article I decided to deep freeze my 2.5 clicker this morning to see if I could recover what was not recoverable otherwise.

Well Im back from work, took the drive from the freezer and let it thaw out for about 10 minutes hooked up a usb cable and this puppy is transfering data with no clicks at all.

Im going to trash the drive asap but the frig is now another tool in my arsenal of geek knowledge.

Im happy as a pig in slop right about now :-)

at least he was smart enough to figure something like this out.

@rsquared: Whatev man, just thro it in tha deep fryer, it'll be fyne.

This is not a very good idea, this could easily expand the read and write heads and get them to be stuck on the actual platters. Plus if you take into account that your platters are scratched this will in fact expand the scratches, plus it could demagnitize them and you may lose your data forever. Honestly it's best to just send it to a data recovery company, and you had better do your research beforehand because there are alot of companies that will scam you or overcharge you, the best thing is to do your research you can just go to datarecoverycomparison and the extension is net, but it wont let me post because it would be considered a URL. It has a list of user generated reviews, plus the guy that runs it actually is in the process of doing independent investigations which are completely documented with pictures, videos, and voice recordings of all interactions with these companies.