Comment on HDD data recovery
mozz@mbin.grits.dev 4 months ago
You're going to think I am joking but I am not. Multiple people have sworn to me that this works for a common failure mode of HDD drives and I've literally never heard someone say they tried it and it failed. I've never tried it. Buyer beware. Don't blame me if you fuck up your drive / your computer it's connected to / anything else even worse by doing this:
I was aware of this trick also, the first thing I tried. Nothing changed. I even tried it in 2 double double zipped freezer baggies for a week. No difference in acoustics from the drive after spin up.
However thanks for bringing this up; I forgot I tried this lol.
just_another_person@lemmy.world 4 months ago
This only works for specific mechanical failures, and I’d say about 25% of the time. It works because metal shrinks when cold, and this can sort of let a drive limp along for a short period of time to get small amounts of data off.
Drive clicking is the drive arm malfunctioning, and I wouldn’t expect the freezer trick to do much if it’s a messed up actuator or something. You already know the drive is bad though, so why not.
remotelove@lemmy.ca 4 months ago
I used to take failed drives while they were powered on and kinda snap them really with a fast twisting motion in an attempt to get the arm to move or get the platters spinning.
It never worked.
zer0squar3d@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 months ago
Yeah… That probably because either the drive thought it was falling and triggered the HDD falling mechanism (often found on 2.5" hdd) which would move the arms off the disks to prevent them from hitting it and damaging the platters to unrecoverable states.
Or if done on 3.5" without this feature built into it, could just damage the platters.
Would probably be less risky to open it up and unstick the arms yourself.
remotelove@lemmy.ca 4 months ago
It was on old 3.5" drives a long time ago, before anything fancy was ever built into the drives. It was in a seriously rough working environment anyway, so we saw a lot of failed drives. If strange experiments didn’t work to get the things working, mainly for lulz, the next option was to see if a sledge hammer would fix the problem. Funny thing… that never worked either.
mle86@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Clicking drives can also sometimes be recovered wirh this method.
I think the clicking in that specific case comes from the fact that the drive sends the arm / heads to the parking position immediately when the rpm of the platter doesn’t match expectations, because rpm is critical for keeping the distance between head an platter.
Meaning the heads are ok, but clicking because a seized up bearing or motor doesn’t spin properly.
Be aware though, it is theoretically possible that ice crystals can form from air humidity condensating, which can cause the head to crash into the platter which makes the data definitely unrecoverable.
zer0squar3d@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 months ago
Yup this was the first thing I tried. Nothing changed.