[TriLUG] OT: Laptop Hard Drive

[Joseph Mack NA3T]

On Thu, 17 Nov 2011, Tom Eisenmenger wrote:

> If you're just looking for a quick spin-up so you can back 
> the drive up, I've had some success putting the drive in a 
> ziplock freezer bag, squeeze out as much air as possible, 
> put it in a freezer for an hour or so, then install and 
> try to boot.

I forgot about this. I've had great success with this too. 
(You may need a couple of cycles to get all the data off.) 
Keep the drive in the ziplock when you pull it out of the 
freezer or the electronics will get wet and the drive won't 
work (in the only case I got the drive wet this way, it 
recovered when dried by warming to room temp). Don't try to 
boot from it. That requires a high level of integrity in the 
drive. For the moment just try to recover sectors. Put it in 
an external USB enclosure and try dd'ing the whole drive. If 
there are bad sectors (doesn't sound like your problem, 
yours sounds like a dead drive mechanism) then ddrescue 
retries bad sectors. ddrescue will time out on a bad sector, 
write the sector number to a log and then proceed allowing 
you to get the rest of the drive. Then you can send ddrescue 
back to retry only the bad sectors till you have to refreeze 
the drive.

> Out of desperation, I've also whacked the drive with the 
> palm of my hand (FYI, "whack" is indeed a technical term 
> ;-)  It is preferable to remove it from the PC before 
> doing so.

haven't tried that one. I'd try it after being sure you 
can't recover it by freezing.

Joe

-- 
Joseph Mack NA3T EME(B,D), FM05lw North Carolina
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