[olug] freeze drive to recover data - Re: Rescue CD

[Brian Wiese]

Jeff Hinrichs - DM&T wrote:
> Cold is your friend. take you drive and mount it in an external USB
> case.  Put the entire usb case/drive in your freezer with the data and
> power cables hanging out to be connected later without opening the
> door and let it cool for about 30 minutes.  Then connect the USB cable
> to your working computer, mount the drive read only and start sucking
> everything you can find off of it.  Work as quickly as you can because
> the heat exacerbates the drive problem.  Be complete as the trick may
> not work a second time on the same drive.  Chilling the drive will
> contract the metal parts ever so slightly -- it's worked the past 4
> out of 5 times for me, just enough to get your data, maybe not
> everything, copied off.
>
> Once you get the most important files off and then the secondary, then
> you can try and copy the drive image to a file.  I wouldn't start
> there first as heat builds up and you are going to hit every sector on
> the disk with a dd.  I only attempt that as a last measure after I've
> got what I needed and am ok with the idea of possibly having flying
> shards and shavings of metal go flying around in the drive.  You still
> face that possibility when you are pulling off key files, but I've
> been lucky in that regard.
>   
I'll say ditto to the above... just a couple of days ago I did the same 
thing, and have done it in the past... drop the HD in the freezer for 
awhile (30min - 3 days??) (I placed mine in 3 levels of ziplock bags for 
the heck of it, prevent freezer burn/moisture? drive is sealed though, 
so I'm just paranoid.)  My drive was knocking, the system locked up and 
then wouldn't boot... but after a little 'cooling off time' in the 
freezer... she began to cooperate again.  I was able to mount her up 
alright and copy my most important data off first.  Be sure to copy "cp 
-f" and don't drag-n-drop your files, as Gnome crashed out on me a 
couple of times and I think from reading corrupted blocks from the drive 
or something. (in my defense, I was using the GUI to scan which files I 
needed to copy off quickly, faster than cd->ls (repeat).)

As mentioned earlier, I wouldn't dd the drive, just get the files off 
that you need if you can mount it of course and save any reads to the 
disk that you can.  I'm just glad my drive wasn't totally gone by the 
time I got to it!  I'm surprised the 'freeze your drive for recovery' 
method is not advertised much out there. (I recently googled hd recovery 
advice as well)

Brian