Amazing Home Remedies - Recover a Crashed Hard Drive

Got a crashed hard drive? Just pop it in the freezer for 24-48 hours after sealing it in a plastic bag while sucking out all the air possible and plug it back in! It will work, if only for a short time, so you can get your data off of the drive. There have been cases where it fixed them permanently but I haven't had as much success. To get the data off as fast as possible (time is a factor), use both IDE ports inside the computer, put the hard drive with another operating system on one, and unplug your CD drives (you won't be using them now) and plug the other drive into that port that you just freed up. This allows both drives to write at the same time, rather than one drive writing and reading at a time. This is the basis of a RAID configuration. Set this up before you take the hard drive out of the freezer. Get on Google and find a free disk imaging program and image the drive AS SOON AS YOUR COMPUTER LOADS! Then extract the image and you have all your data back. Although this doesn't work all the time, I have had success with this (Three for Three).

Science Behind It

(You might need this diagram to see what I am talking about) The science behind this trick is the elementary school fact that things contract when they get cold. The head that writes the data crashes into the plate when a piece of dust or other foreign material get into the hard drive. The hard drive is built in a clean environment to avoid dust infiltration but it sometime happens anyway. MAKE SURE YOUR COMPUTER IS CLEAN! Back to the contracting. When you freeze the hard drive, the head contracts enough to lift off of the plate and is able to move freely again. This lets the hard drive be able to work so you can get the data off of it. Hard Drives heat up when they are used so this is why time is a factor to consider.

Review

Take the crashed hard drive out of your computer, put it in the freezer in a plastic bag and suck all the air out of it, leave it for about 24-48 hours, pull the hard drive out, take it out of the plastic bag, put it in your computer using the second IDE cable, image it, extract the image, and you have all of your data back!