Cold Remedy for Dead Drives
Here’s a weird little tip that has been doing the rounds for a while — it first came to Propellerhead’s attention in the late 1980’s — and over the years quite a few people claim to have temporarily revived a dead or dying hard drive simply by popping it in the freezer for a few hours.
The drive should be tightly sealed inside a ‘Ziplock’ plastic bag, to prevent condensation and left in the freezer compartment for at least two or three hours. It’s not a permanent fix and once back inside the case the drives apparently work long enough for the user to recover data, maybe 20 minutes to half an hour.
Obviously this isn’t going to work for all types of hard disc failure — and there are plenty of serious faults freezing cannot help rectify — but if you have exhausted all other methods, and you need to recover an important file in a hurry then it has to be worth a try. For more practical tips, and one or two more oddball ones like this head over to the PCTopTips website
