By Philip Churchill on September 28th, 2009
Frozen Server
What can you do with:
a) A Windows Home Server machine
b) A 2TB Hard Drive
and finally
c) A Freezer
After hearing a horrible clicking noise from his hard drive Shawn Steele eventually got the data off his drive by placing it into his freezer, after which WHS could read the data off of it…umm frozen data!
Read Shawn’s story here, and PS I don’t recommend ANYONE placing there hard drive in the freezer. If you do you are on your own.
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I have done this a few times with great success. I use my vac. sealer to keep moisture to a minimum. I freeze the drive and start copying the data off it systematically. Sometimes when the drives heats up, it fails again. So it is back to the freezer for another cycle.
As a last resort… I, too, have had some success with freezing a hard drive. Works better on desktop drives than laptop drives. Seems the extreme temperature frees the read/write head from the spinning platters, giving you a few minutes to recover data. Was able to recover all of a friend’s family photos before the drive permanently died.