Indie-Resource.com

So I have an external harddrive that went ka-put on me a few months back. It would connect, and I could start transfering a file/using it and within minutes it would lock up and be unusable. I put it away thinking that I might run into a method to fix it down the road.

I happened to stumble upon a blog post a few days ago. Apparently, some guy was having the same problem as me, on his laptop. He put his laptop his refridgerator for about 45 minutes and viola, the hard drive was working again! He was able to transfer the files he needed off onto an external. Once the harddrive warmed up it would lock up again, but it gave him a good amount of time to get what he needed, and he just kept cooling it off again.

I tried it with my broken hard drive today. Put it in the freezer for about a half hour. Took it out, put it back in the external case and plugged it in. I've now recovered over 30GB worth of files which I thought were lost, and it doesn't show any hints of slowing down yet (about 20 minutes out of the freezer and running.)


Figured I would share this with anyone that was having hard drive problems and needed to recover files from it. I have no idea why it works, nor how damaging it is to your hard drive, but if your HD is broken already it's worth a shot.

Pretty interesting!

As a side note, although I think you already alluded to doing this, make a back-up of everything you want to keep on that drive ASAP! Usually tricks like these--such as the towel over a Red Ring of Death Xbox 360--typically don't last all that long.

hehe nice! yep towel never worked for me... but I have re-baked ram chips to get them working again...placing them in the oven to reset the solder...

Jack - yep, it only lasts about 20-30 minutes before it starts locking up again. It's just used as a temporary fix to get your crap off, lol. The drive has about 500gb worth of files on it, but not all of them are that important (I don't remember most of what's on it), but I got a ton off. Probably around 40 gigs total last night recovered.

This is a quite old trick, but it still works