堅定流？

DUE,

My external hard drive died over the weekend and I was upset that I was going to lose all of the data on it. In desperation I asked a friend for some advice on what I might be able to do to get information off of it. He suggested putting the hard drive into the freezer for a few hours and that it would probably give me a few more hours (or more) of life with the drive. Much to my surprise, this did work and I got all of my data off of the disk.

But, I'm now stumped as to *why* this should work. I believe that I had what's called a "head crash" where one of the disk heads slams into a platter and starts to scratch the surface of the disk. How could the freezer possibly help this type of failure? Do you have any good explanations as to why putting a hard drive into the freezer would let you recover data from it? Or when putting a hard drive into the freezer might not work? I can't find a good answer anywhere.

Thanks!

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Dear Saved but Stumped,

I was stumped too, but asked some of the computer geniuses here at Cornell, who came up with these references.

"According to the folks at the PC Mechanic website -- freezing the hard drive will cool down overheating chips and make the platters contract a bit to make it easier for the heads to read the data.

Also, via Google, we found another example of what we believe to be a 'wrong way' to freeze hard drives (see below).

Uncle Ezra