My primary computer suffered a failure of the primary hard drive last night. I had backups, but not complete and not recent. I purchased a new drive this morning and reinstalled Windows XP and various applications, but still wanted to get the data off the old drive. So I tried something I’d heard about, which is to freeze a hard drive that’s not booting.
Well, it worked, sort of. At least for about an hour or so, I was able to read data off the drive and copy it elsewhere. But then it stopped working, so I returned the drive to the freezer. When I first took the drive out of the freezer, it was ice-cold (as you’d expect) but was warm when it failed. So it seems that some component(s) shrunk when cooled enough for the drive to work. I’d always wondered if that trick would work, and I’m pleased to say that it does.