Trick To Hard Drive Freez

As an experienced professional in the IT industry , I will tell you that the hard drive freezer trick is not a myth . I was actually surprised to see how many articles and forum posts there are online that claim that freezing a drive in attempt to recover data never works . This trick involves some luck , but you must also be sure to do it correctly .

Don't expect this to be a permanent fix , because it isn't . Also , don't expect this to work with a bad drive every time . What you can expect from this trick is to possibly get your drive to spin up long enough for you to copy over important files to a different device .

While the hard drive freezer trick can possibly do more harm than good to the drive , there is a chance that the cooler temperature will allow it to function for a short period of time . Again , this could actually damage the drive even more and make it harder to recover data using other methods . If your data is worth a significant chunk of money to you , I would suggest seeking professional data recovery services .
Wrap the hard drive in some kind of absorbent material ( dish cloth , ShamWow , etc . . . )
Put the hard drive in a sealed bag ( ziplock bag , anti-static bag , etc . . . )
Put the hard drive in the freezer for several hours .
Take the hard drive out of the freezer , bag , and cloth . Connect it to your computer ( while the system is powered off ) . Start the computer and be ready to start pulling data off of it as soon as possible ( assuming that it finishes booting ) .
It actually works much better if you don't rely on the operating system installed on the bad hard drive . You could use an IDE/SATA to USB adapter to connect the bad drive to a computer that already has an operating system loaded and ready to go . With an adapter , you can also connect the drive to the computer while it is already running . Using this method , you will buy yourself some extra time and increase your chances of recovering the data that you need