Ok, this is one of my favorite stories of data recovery. I did this about a month ago and its always a blast (when it works). I have seen this in the past and it works about 25% of the time. I had a customer that had a hard drive that had stopped spinning. This is different than other hard drive failures that create a clicking sound on the hard drive. If the hard drive is clicking youre probably looking around $1000 to get your data back, if the data recovery company can get the data. This story is different as the hard drive makes no sound at all.
The theory behind this is that the freezer cools down the hard drive bearings and makes them contract and while the hard drive is running it keeps it cool too. Hard drives run very hot and bad hard drives run even hotter. The steps to this are as follows.
1. Buy the exact same hard drive and make sure the firmware sticker on the drive matches whe bad one.
2. Replace the electronics on the bad hard drive.
3. Make sure you have some sort of hard drive enclosure that will plug into the USB and a hard drive that is big enough to copy the data to.
4. Stick the hard drive in the freezer for 24 hours.
5. Pray, pray pray and then plug the USB cable into the computer.
6. If the drive starts spinning get your data off as fast as possible starting with the most critical files and then the second most critical and so on. For windows I like using the unstoppable copier from http://www.roadkil.net/ and Apple has their own version of data recovery. Above is a picture of the data recovery done recently.
BRM Laptop Repair
3171 N. High St.
Columbus, OH 43202
www.BRMLaptopRepair.com
laptop.repair@gmx.com
614-313-9901
