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During a failed attempt to put a second hard drive in this machine. (Machine just doesn't like any config but the original). Anyway I managed to drop a hard drive on the floor. It's barely limping along and I want to try to get the stuff off of it before it dies all together. I remember reading several times in this forum about putting the hard drive in the freezer to get it to stay alive a little longer? Did a quick search in the history but no luck. Was I dreaming? Does anyone remember discussing this and let me know if it's for real?
You can try it, but I don't think anything helps after dropping one.
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Yeah, it's really in the area of last-ditch efforts. There are numerous online testimonials but those drives typically died from 'natural causes' - yours has doubtless sustained major damage, and it's surprising it works as well as you say
The concept seems to be chilling the drive in order to cause contraction, in the hope of freeing up any seized or binding parts.
Condensation may be an issue
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Well, barely working. This is truely a last resort so I'm going to try it. I'll let you know if I'm able to get it going and get anything off of it.
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And if you can access its contents thereafter... immediately transfer the contents to a working drive; and maybe also to optical media (CD/DVD); verify they are truly readable/accesible - then dump the drive.
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If you're going to try this, do it as follows:
Put the drive in a ziplock bag and remove as much air as possible from the bag. (This is because of the moisture/condensation issue.) Leave it in the freezer for a couple of hours. When you remove it, install it into the PC as quickly as possible, & fire it up, before it returns to room temperature.
As noted above, this is truly a last ditch effort.
HTH
Dave
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And if you have any silica gel sachets... put a couple of those inside the ziplock baggy too... They may help absorb any free floating moisture that might otherwise condense wherever...
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Well I did put it in the freezer for a couple hours in a ziplock bag. Moisture was a problem after taking it out but I dried it off best I could. I plugged it back into the Compaq but it wouldn't recognise it so I plugged it into my Dell which was able to "see" it and with Acronis started to "ghost" it. After about 3 hours at 3 in the morning and the program said 4 more hours to go, and growing, I shut it down. 230 MB was copied out of 3.something GB. This morning I tried just a straight "copy" to another hard drive at room temp and after 6 hours the same 230 MB was copied. I might have gotten more but didn't want to overtax the old Dell any more. So in conclusion the freezer didn't make a difference in this case BUT one of the files saved was "My Documents" so IF there is some critical item I absolutely needed in the future I'd try it again. Thought you guys might be interested in something different.........
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That's basicly the way I had it set up on the Dell. I was able to open up various screens to look at but nothing would run and to copy took more time then it was worth. Luckly I have an extra hard drive so the kids won't be offline for long. I just don't understand why this Compaq Deskpro won't accept more then one hard drive on a ribbon cable and won't run except in CS jumper setting.
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