Discovery! Malfunctioning Hard Drive Freeze

Problem: Three failed identical drives, their history is that they belonged to a raid 5 array and they all failed over the course of time.

Question: Is there a way to repair or recover data from a failed HDD that is making that I’m-Obviously-Dead-*Click* noise?

Answer: No. Yes. Maybe. Kinda. Luck. It depends on what is actually wrong with your hard drive.

Three points to know when dealing with audible hard drive failure.

This is what an open hard disk looks like WHICH YOU WILL NEVER SEE BECAUSE YOU ARE SMART ENOUGH TO NEVER OPEN ONE UP. You should be familiar with the source of the noise, which is circled as number 1. The *click* noise is actually the back of the arm that moves the head hitting the housing while returning to point 0. This happens when it tries to read the hard drive, fails, and tries again and again and agai*click**click**click**click**click* This can be because of a mechanical failure OR the chip that controls that function has shorted out/reset/whatever; making it a calibration failure. You should also be familiar with the head of the hard drive, and know that if you hear a scraping or scratching noise in addition (or even without) the clicking, you’re hard drive is in pretty much already gone. That noise is your platter being ripped up and rendered useless. Totaled. Forever. So anyway….

Solution: I heard this weird thing a long time ago, and re-read it on the internet; that if you put a hard drive in the freezer it will fix the clicking and restore your hard drive to a fixable state. REALLY? HOLY CRAP! I have been reffering people to DriveSavers for $500 just to evaulate the drive and $1000 more for the recovery, which may not work. You mean that all I have to do is throw this sucker in my HOME FREEZER!?

Critical Thinking: If putting things in freezer really fixed them, my girlfriend would be in there. (God, I hope she never reads that.) I am totally skeptical of this processes for the following reasons. I have never heard or read of low temperatures reseting or recalibrating a flash chip, so if that’s the case with a clicking HDD I’m pretty sure a freezer will do nothing. If my head is damaged, I don’t think that icicles are going to form where the magnetic head once was and suddenly read. In all my research; the one reason that seemed to make sense was if there was a mechanical problem with any component that controls the arm caused from overheating/overspinning and something fell out of place… but for the sake of science, I am testing this claim and I hope no one takes out the hard drives and try microwaving them after thinking that they are TV dinners.

Formerly Drive 7: I plugged the drive in as a secondary SATA device and my computer wouldn’t even see it in the Bios. It locked up my posting process and I could not get into Windows because the controller suddenly decided that it couldn’t read ANY devices plugged in(Dude, it’s a Dell). After four hours in the freezer, I plugged it back in, and it continued to make the hard drive click, THOUGH it was recognized by the Bios, didn’t prevent me from booting off my first drive and into Windows. I got distracted and abbandoned this whole project until the next day.

Formerly Drive 4: I left this guy in the freezer overnight, and for ha-has, gave it a try. It made one click, which was quieter than before, and then stopped making noise altogether. I thought that I had not sealed the bag enough and that condensation had slipped into the drive and killed it; but then I realized that the drive was quietly spinning as it normally would. HOLY COW! Really. I thought that this was just some stupid myth that IT people tell users to see how far they can abuse their position of authority. I am currently formating this drive with a one NTFS partition taking up the whole drive. It’s at 84% after two hours which for 465.76GB seems reasonable.

Formerly Drive 5: …is still in the freezer, and Former Drive 7 is back in there.

Conclusion: These hard drives were in a raid config using a 75GB partition on a 500GB drive. This is one reason that I feel contributed to their failure. They don’t hold confidential data from my company and they have already been replaced, otherwise I wouldn’t risk putting them in a freezer. My concluding theory is that the problem was mechanical, and the freezing must contract something that has been affected by heat; eitherway I had confirmed this drive was dead before putting it in the freezer, and whatever happed drastically changed the drives behavior. I’m no specialist, and neither is anyone on the internet, but it seems to be accepted that the freezing contracts [something] and keeps it in place long enough to function. My new question is: Is the drive fixed or temporarily repaired? Something I read was to operate the drive from inside the freezer, because it may last as few as two minutes before whatever shorted/fell out of place goes ahead and dies again.

THE NEXT DAY

Drive four failed to format. during the second attempt, the clicking resumed. So the low temperatures are not a cure but a temporary fix. We now need to invent a refrigerated sata drive enclosure. I have dubbed these drives dead, but it is good to know that there is some logic to the old just-freeze-it protip and that it does work for a limited amount of time.

Resources:

This was very interesting to watch, he also covers the bumping technique.

This blog is about someone who experienced the temporary drive fix using a SUPER old maxtor