Frozen drive over ice, a weird recovery story

I thought this was an amusing story and thought I would share it. It's also a good method for recovering data from a drive with a heat failure. I got a frantic call one day from one of my customers. He is an orthopedic surgeon, and he also lectures on the subject. His main computer at his home had a weird problem. It would run for about 10 minutes, and then freeze. At first, I thought it was some strange virus or mail zombie, but upon closer inspection, I noticed that the drive would begin making strange noises after about 10 minutes. He had some lectures on there that he needed in a day or so. I had an idea. I took the machine home to my shop, removed the drive, and placed it into an external USB case. I put the drive in my freezer and closed the door, with the power and USB cable exiting out the door. I let it sit in there for a good 15 minutes to let it cool down to freezing. (My wife passed by and saw this, and said, "I just don't want to know.") I then powered up the drive, and plugged it into my laptop. I was able to copy every last piece of data off that drive. It took about 90 minutes to copy it all off, through the laptop and onto my server. Everything was flawlessly backed up. I emailed him the PowerPoint presentations and Word docs he needed and then rebuilt his machine with new drives and RAID controller, then copied all the files back. He was happy. So the next time you run into a drive that fails consistently after a few minutes, you are probably looking at a heat failure. Try my freezer recovery method. Jeff Gross