Dead Hard Drive? Lost Data? Try the Freezer Method! Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
1,000 words · ~5 min read
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it is now 10:03 we are here in my kitchen because we are about to
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undertake an experiment which uh I have
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actually never had the need to attempt
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before cuz I do usually have all of my data backed up in two separate places so
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this is a Seagate free agent glex it's the one I unboxed a while back this is a
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1 tbte drive and um what I normally use
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it for is as a steam Drive I just run off USB 3 or power D SATA depending
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what's on my test bench and then I keep all my Steam games on it and I run Steam
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right off this drive so that I don't have to worry about reinstalling it and copying files around all all the time so
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that's fine that's all fine and good cuz I keep a backup of it on my home server
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with all the Steam games so that's that's done that's taken care of what I
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didn't have backed up when this drive decided to die on me was a bunch of
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footage that I had decided to move from my work PC to home so I could archive it
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on my Home Server so I have about 100 gigs of video files on here that I would
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really like to get off so what happened is the drive died on me and
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um my cat is in the garbage please don't
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thank you hey go on okay so my drive decided to die on me
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and I would really like to get that footage it's not essential but it would
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be great to have so we are going to
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be hey go
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on we're going to be doing a guide for resur directing a dead drive so the
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first thing is I'm going to unplug the interface cable from it I'm going to put
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it inside an anti-static bag this part is not actually like necessary but it's
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not bad as a due diligence thing to do so this particular Drive Ziploc freezer
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bag by the way this particular Drive the problem appears to be that it's not
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spinning once it's got power I can hear it making little noises inside but the
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disc does not spin if the drive spins it is quite unlikely that this method will
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work so this drive doesn't spin so we are going to try the freezer method I'm
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going to freeze it for a couple hours so it's 10:00 now I'm going to come back
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around midnight and then I'm going to attempt to Power It Up and read the data
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off it this can sometimes recover drives for 20 to 30 minutes but other times it
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does not work so I would love to be able to pull my data off and I will let you
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guys know how this goes just give me a moment
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here okay
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I'm just going to put that in my freezer
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there let's find a good place to put it
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maybe I'll put it here on the meat no I'm not going to put it on the
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meat I'm going to put it with the frozen peas so hopefully it'll uh cool down a
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little faster let get the corn
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here there we go packed in there
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somewhat and I will be back in 2 hours
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and we'll attempt to to get some data off my drive okay guys time for the acid
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test it's uh well you can't really see
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that but it's 1:00 in the morning and
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I'm pretty tired but I figure an extra hour it's probably not
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going to hurt my chances here the drive feels quite cold just in the kitchen
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right now I'm going to grab my interface cable head back upstairs
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all right close that heading up the
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stairs probably going to find a cat or two on my way there's one
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aha there's another one looking at the
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uh the mouse aquarium okay so what we're going to do
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is we're going to get on this computer here and at some point my camera will
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decide to f Focus we're going to open up
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this drive take a of the zip lock
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bag I'm just going to leave it in the anti-static bag I mean if there's
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anything we can do to uh lessen the
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likelihood of condensation forming on the drive probably a good
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thing I'm going to go ahead and plug
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that interface cable in
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okay oops let's come around to the side
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of the computer here I'm going to plug that into USB 3 in order to enable as
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high a possible transmission speed here
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and let's see if it gets
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detected so I haven't pretested this or anything I have no idea if this is going
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to
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work free agent no way oh no that's a
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man I got my hopes up but that's the restored one from my uh Home
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Server
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so it looks like it's not
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detected well that's a real disappoint appointment all right well thanks for
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checking out this inquisitive episode of lonus tech tips don't forget to
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subscribe for more unboxings reviews and other computer videos one last update the drive now
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appears to be detected I pulled it out of the uh glex housing and it's now just
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a a bare drive it's a one tab free play
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as you can see it's a thick 2 and 1/2 in Drive
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however if I go to the properties of the drive
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and look for any volumes it would appear that there are none
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so it's hooped