this sucks.

my hard drive has gone to shit. i go to turn on my computer and i can hear it making some high pitched squealing noise, over and over.

meanwhile the BIOS splash screen turns to what looks like an attempt to boot via the network card. which eventually fails ("Exiting Broadcom PXE ROM. No Boot Devicie Detected)

all the whiile the hard drive is making the same whirring/clicking/squealing sounds.

this sounds really bad. the computer is about 4-5 years old (Dell Dimension) ... needless to say the hard drive has a ton of stuff that i need to recover and dont have backed up

where should i start?

5/21/2007 12:27:23 AM

freezer trick

5/21/2007 12:35:37 AM

Bag HDD. Put into freezer. Remove from freezer. Hope to god it works again and back up as many files as possible before it dies again.

5/21/2007 12:49:18 AM

no shit, you guys ^, ^^ are serious

have you ever seen this done successfully?

and how long? 5 minutes? 30?






[Edited on May 21, 2007 at 2:02 AM. Reason : ]

5/21/2007 1:57:26 AM

10 minutes should do it.

If this doesn't work, try smacking the drive good and hard while it's turned off.

[Edited on May 21, 2007 at 2:40 AM. Reason : ]

5/21/2007 2:39:53 AM

if i was a paranoid person, i'd think i was being clowned here

5/21/2007 2:52:25 AM

[Edited on May 21, 2007 at 2:53 AM. Reason : dp]

5/21/2007 2:52:50 AM

http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=freezer+hard+drive&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

It sounds crazy, but it's a common tactic. At this point, you have nothing to lose.

No one knows if it actually really works, but there's a lot of anecdotal evidence.

5/21/2007 3:31:26 AM

10 minutes won't cut it. Put it in there for at least a few hours, the longer the better. If you have a way to keep it cool (and not get it wet) after you remove it from the freezer, that is ideal. FYI I have tried this trick with no luck. It's totally dependent on how your drive is failing, and how far along in the death stages it is.

Lesson of the day - back up your data.

5/21/2007 10:22:56 AM

You may also want to get a copy of xxcopy (http://www.xxcopy.com).
If the freezer trick works (and I've had it work for me on a drive where the electronics were failing) you will need something that can start the copy and then pick back up from where it left off if the drive stops copying. IE copy till it gets hot and stops, Freeze, Copy some more until it stops, repeat.
XXCopy has a buttload of command line options.
try xxcopy F:\*.* c:\safeplace\ /S /E /C /Y /BB /H /oNc:\xxcopy.log

Good Luck

5/21/2007 6:25:07 PM

really get a ide → usb adapter with a really long usb extension cord and you can just leave the drive in the freezer while you gt the info off of it

5/21/2007 6:34:15 PM

i've seen a drive work after putting in the freezer for a while (wouldn't work beforehand). You need to slave it though. If the OS won't boot you're fucked either way. But if you slave it successfully you may be able to at least copy files. Considering the problem it may not work, and if it does it may not work again. So take no chances. Be ready to copy everything the first time it works.

5/21/2007 6:45:21 PM

okay, this freezer trick sounds interesting.

but the sounds that the drive is making, a high pitched squealing noise (imagine: "RRReee RRReee whirr RRReee" ... over and over) make me think its a mechanical failure.

i dont know for sure, of course, im just guessing.

but if it's a mechanical failure, the freezer trick won't work will it? that seems to be for overheating electronic components...

5/21/2007 7:35:55 PM

The freezer trick works on a variety of things, including some mechanical failure. God knows why, but when it works, it kicks ass.

5/21/2007 8:34:02 PM

aight.

well ill try it. and ill get an IDE->USB cable so i can try and copy it from the freezer

5/21/2007 8:48:45 PM

Ok, i have had to recently replace my laptop hard drive for a similar sounding hd failure (more clicking than whining sound though). I've heard about the freezer trick and am considering trying it. A classmate of mine suggested putting it into an external usb enclosure and plugging it into a linux machine. He said that it could be possible to copy an image of the entire drive onto the host machines drive and backup from there. Does this sound possible or a good idea?

5/21/2007 8:56:56 PM

don't connect an NTFS volume to a linux box. i did that and it corrupted my NTFS volume. maybe that was a weird case, but just saying...

5/21/2007 10:02:51 PM

^That's an odd situation, since I use an NTFS drive on my Linux PC every day without trouble.

Since you have basically catastrophic drive failure, your best bet is to simply try the freezer trick + ide->usb adapter + xxcopy. If it is absolutely critical that you get your data back, there are professional labs that can extract the data through various means, but you will pay top dollar for that.

Good Luck.

5/21/2007 11:35:25 PM