First I'll introduce myself. I do not work for a law enforcement agency or data recovery firm, but instead work as a hardware tech for a small college. I've searched the web pretty extensively for the information that I have only found in computer forensic sites/forums. So even though my reasons are different, I still sometimes find myself in the same situation as many of you: I've got a busted drive and I need the data. I apologize if my question here is somewhat off topic since I'm trying to recover data while spending less than $50 and less than a few hours as well as the fact that I don't need to preserve the integrity of the drive for evidence purposes and often I am trying to recover data from a drive that if data can't be recovered for free then it will just go in the trash.
Thanks to all of you participating here. I only wish I could find a hardware tech type site that provided this type of resource.
Now to the freezer trick. I read in a nother thread here someone reporting a drive that didn't work with the freezer method but he was able to put the drive on the dashboard of his car to heat it up a bit, then was able to mount the drive and recover the data. That thread also had someone saying that either freezing or heating a drive was a terrible idea and would more often than not destroy the drive. Well, I've used the freezer method many times and I've got just about a 40% success rate.
These are drives belonging to either poor college students or the college itself. On the rare occasion that the data is worth the cost of recovery then we send the drive to the professionals. Usually the data is not worth the cost but it is worth 5 minutes of my time to try what tricks have worked in the past. Once it is to the point where we are going to just throw the drive away I can't help but start trying unconventional methods. If the heads are stuck and the freezer trick doesn't work then sometimes I'll try what we like to call, "percussive maintenance" where we simply drop the drive from about an inch onto a static mat. Then from progressively higher points until either the drive mounts or it busts into many little pieces. This method only works about 10% of the time but the fact remains that I've had students, almost in tears, come to me with a crashed drive and no money and I've been able to give them their data. That's what I call job satisfaction.
If the freezer trick should not be used, yet I use it and it works, how could I use it more effectively? How sudden and steep a change in temperature is too sudden or too steep? Does anyone have a temperature range that seems to work well? I've left a drive in for a few hours and gotten it to mount immediately. I've also left a drive in overnight and I ended up having to leave it out for a half hour to warm up a bit before it would then mount. Has anyone else been sucessful at heating a drive and recovering data?
Again, I apologize if my posting this type of question/comment is not welcome at this site.
-Josh
"percussive maintenance"
Nice 🙂
Welcome to the forums.
Jamie
Your subject is appropriate and your question(s) are well asked.
That said - at the risk of sweeping generalization and despite hundreds of reported successes - indeed, I maintain that the old freezer trick is an urban myth and have been trying to shed some light and facts on the subject for some time.
I think it's a topic well worth examining and I will be glad to provide info and details as to to why it does or does not work in various situations and provide some insight into what happens when it's tried. That's what forums like this should be about - a certain amount of healthy disagreement and debate.
This is a rather long and detailed discussion - I'll try to write up a rebuttal of freezer technique claims (or rather a defence of my statements opposing them ) and post them here in the next few days.
I love the idea of the freezer trick. No matter how many experts tell you that you can't (which is exactly what I would have said), if it don't matter and it don't work anyway, Git'erdone.
If I had a dead drive and no options left, being from the South I would probably wrap it in duct tape just to see what would happen. It has amazing powers on everything else :).
I love the idea of the freezer trick. No matter how many experts tell you that you can't (which is exactly what I would have said), if it don't matter and it don't work anyway, Git'erdone.
If I had a dead drive and no options left, being from the South I would probably wrap it in duct tape just to see what would happen. It has amazing powers on everything else :).
I have to agree, there has been so many times that logic fails and pure luck/chance actually does the job. As stated before, there are many reason for the various "myths" to actually work but it does boil down to luck.
For the longest time I was telling my clients that it was a waste of time and can actually cause more damage than good (That is what I was taught) until one day I was desperate and tried it (Being that there was not any important data but I hate loosing) so I tried it and it was able to fire it up till I recovered the data, didn't work the second round though for I seized the platters.
I now believe in the "Anything is possible if I see it" theory… 😉
The downside of the freezer trick is that rapid cooling can cause moisture to condense inside the case. It the heads free up and hit themoisture, the drive will crash.
As for the opposite extreme, I have used a hair dryer to heat the metal side. But then, I have been known to put keyboards in the dishwasher to clean them. (Water and electronics are only adversarial when electricity is present) Set your oven for 110 degrees and put the keyboard in for 1 hour, to dry.
Later,
LSG
there are two types of problem that can be fixed by tempurature change, broken traces and sticktion. success is random and the fix is almost always temporary. extreme tempuratures will almost always disrupt the magnetic recording. using tempurature to diagnose broken traces does not usually require the whole drive to be cooled, spray just the board with coldspray. physical manipulation is better than tempurature for sticktion.
Thanks for your input NotAnotherBob! I am still very interested in this topic and hope that more people add their knowledge and experience to the thread.
So by "physical manipulation", do you mean "hit the dang thing"?
Again, my goal is to rescue data by some means which takes not too much time and costs less than $5. I use these methods only when my only other option is to throw the drive away because a poor college student doesn't have $2000 to pay someone to retreive their thesis and mp3 collection.
Where can I learn how to decide on the best method (percussive or temperature change) based on the beautiful grinding and/or clicking noises a drive is making?
physical manipulation can include hitting, but there are more controlled things i would try first, however, if you're getting clicking and grinding, i would guess the platter is already spinning. (when the drive is powered up, you can usually feel the gyro effect as you turn the drive on its side and back, changing the plane or axis of rotation.) clicking and grinding usually means most stuff is working but it cant find the track markings. i dont think any drives will try to seek on a non-spinning disk. if its not spinning, sometimes a sharp twist and snap back, will break it loose. keeping the axis of rotation the same, or to say it a different way, keep the drive's platters in the same plane, just a quick wrist movement. for more firmly stuck disks, i find it an excellent excuse to open the drive. then I can try spinning the disk with my hand and see if its stuck or not. if it spins by hand then the problem could be the motor or control and will be nasty to fix. swapping parts with an identical working drive…
Fujitsu mpg is the worst drive that you can use for raid, so try to fix that one or reconstruct raid from the two broken unes using gdb.
Nikola