Wow, I can't believe it worked

After reading about that freezer trick. I thought I might as well try it out on my dead Maxtor 160 GB hard drive that was sitting in a box for a about half a year. It took several trials (I think I froze it about 3 times several hours each) before I was actually able to access the drive's contents (from a functional drive of course). I got to safely back up all of my unreplaceable pictures that was lost in the clicks of death to my current 250 GB SATA drive (HS Senior homecoming games, Halloween, and other special events.)

Well it died on me again just now. I'm going to freeze it again and see if there's anything else that I need lol. This drive can sure take a cold beating when its dead.

I've been meaning to do this for a while. I know the general idea, but I don't know the exact process. Can you explain it a little bit or link me to a guide, please?

I'm also hoping to fix a Maxtor 160, 3 of them I think.

-fool

Well there's a really miniature guide on these forums right here: http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=755679

It tells you the basics of what you need. The rest is pretty unpredictable, and up to personal trial an error I guess.

I've been able to acess this drive twice already, but I don't really have a specific method on how to make it work. But once I see "Maxtor" somewhere on the boot-up screen, I know for sure that it will be accessable for a short period of time in WIndows. From there I access it like any secondary hard drive, and drag-and-drop what I can get before the drive starts the clicks-of-death cycle again. From there I put it back into the freezer to see if I can do it again.

It seems that I revived my hard drive perminently. This is the 4th successful rescue attempt (out of 8 or so) using the freezer method, but this time it didn't go back to the clicks-of-death after warming up. I don't know how long this will last (it's been working for several hours, and I'm doing a full format at the moment) but for now, I have an extra 160 GB to put useless stuff in. I still don't trust it with anything valuable lol.

Oh yea, I found a reasonable consistent method on how I did it:

Just put it into an antistatic bag, press out as much air as possible, place it into a zip lock, press out more air, and freeze it for a good while (I probably had it in for about 7 hours). Take it out. There should be very little frost around it if you pressed out enough air, but new frost will quickly crust the drive in a matter of minutes. Repeatedly shake the drive left-and-right for a few seconds (in a way that you'll be loosening the discs inside. The discs are probably not moving very much, but the drive itself will be moving from your shaking) If you want to put it this way, you'll be moving the discs inside, and not moving the drive itself. You get what I mean... right?

After that, connect it like any hard drive (make sure you set it up correctly), and go into Windows. If you don't see it, do a hard reset, and it will *probably* show up in the BIOS. If so, let your working hard drive boot into Windows again and see if its there. Also, you'll notice that the frost created from the air will quickly melt if there's real activity going on in the drive, starting from the center of the spinning mechanism of the discs. Otherwise, the frost will stick around for a while. If all of that is successful, pull out as much as you can before it starts clicking again. Once it does, your current transfer will be interrupted, an error message will pop up, and it will disappear from the "My Computer" folder.

Once that's over, rinse and repeat in hope of a second chance.

Well, we'll se how long mine will last before I can claim it as a successful resurrection.

Yoshiyuki Blade said:

It seems that I revived my hard drive perminently. This is the 4th successful rescue attempt (out of 8 or so) using the freezer method, but this time it didn't go back to the clicks-of-death after warming up. I don't know how long this will last (it's been working for several hours, and I'm doing a full format at the moment) but for now, I have an extra 160 GB to put useless stuff in. I still don't trust it with anything valuable lol.
[..]
Well, we'll se how long mine will last before I can claim it as a successful resurrection.

Click to expand...

I wouldn't trust a zombie HDD if I were you ^_-

lol, yeah I know. I had a rude awakening about an hour ago. The awful clicks of horror immediately deprived me of my sleep, so I turned off my comp and ripped it out.

This was an amazingly long period of time to back-up my stuff. I even did a full format, and transferred all of my personal stuff (about 40 GB) back in to see what happens. Apparently the stuff is still in there but it will be unaccesable for now. Lets consider the clicks of death as a "security measure" from any thieves lol.

Oh well, as long as I salvaged unreplaceable data (my pictures to be specific), I'm glad that I didn't toss this drive. I'll put it back into the box from whence it came, and maybe I'll freeze it up again if I lose my precious stuff from another crash. Not likely since I have 2 250 GB hard drives, but the last resort will still be there.

Here's to far-fetched remedies for damaged computer hardware!

how do you deal with condensation inside and outside the drive? would that not kill the platters?

I really haven't thought about that lol. Since I didn't care what would happen to the drive one way or another, it wasn't a precaution that I was considering. All of the condensed air (frost) on the outside quickly melted, then slowly dried up as the drive began to function correctly. I don't know how it affected the circuits and such, but it obviously didn't do enough damage to prevent me from rescuing some of the data that was trapped inside. I have no idea what was going on inside though. I wouldn't be surprised that all of the water formed from the condensation inside the drive dried up as it heated.