Temporarily Recover Failing Hard Drive

[halladayrules]

Is your hard drive facing impending doom? Is it making a clicking sound or some other obvious sign of physical failure. This trick will only work if your hard drive has not physically failed yet. You are still able to see the device in your BIOS but read/writing from it becomes a challenge.

Solution: Place your hard drive in a ziploc baggy (place the hard drive in multiple layers of bags to protect from moisture). Wrap the bagged up hard drive in a cloth towel and place it in your freezer.

The idea behind this science is that the cold temperatures cause the read/write heads to become unstuck and the platters to become less warped (as a result of heat) giving you enough time to read the disc and copy the files over to another source before it eventually fails for good.

It’s really important that you wrap the hard drive up good to prevent moisture from inside the freezer from getting into the hard drive. You will not be exposing the hard drive to freezing temperature for a long period of time but aiding on the side of caution doesn’t hurt.

This tip isn’t for beginners so I cannot stress enough that you know what you are doing before you begin this process. Also this trick is no guarantee hopefully you don’t need to resort to sticking your hard drive in a freezer before losing data, hopefully you are smart and backed it up to another drive already!

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