My PD70X flew and ended up in the freezer!!!!

Yup, came back from a trip to Bali yesterday morning. Was unpacking my clothes and I see the PD70X fly from around waist height - it was still a good idea to pack in the middle of clothes to avoid damage

Anyway, heard the 'click of death' noise and my comp. refused to recognize the drive. After a few hours of googling, decided to leave it out in the freezer for a few hours. Connected it, gave it a few taps and yes, it started spinning.

Quickly retrieved 6GB of snaps from it and now will be replacing the hard disk before my next trip (yes, it still works but I'm not such an idiot to trust it anymore).

So, any of you with a dead hard disk - try these :
- leave it in the freezer for 3-4 hours and connect it. Typically gives atleast 20-30 mins of life back, enough to retrieve the most important data.
- tap it on the non IC side of the hard disk (tap, not bang) and it typically releases the stuck parts.

I've seen this work before. It's a good idea to put the disk in a zip lock bag before putting it in the freezer. You don’t need any moisture to get in or on the drive.

But I would only do this once other data recovery options were exhausted first. Like putting it as a second drive in another pc etc.

Freezing is a well-known trick. When that fails usually what people do is to get an identical drive and swop the platters over in order to recover the data.

From what I read on the internet, it looks to be a 90% success rate - if only for a brief period. But that's all that was required to get the snaps onto the computer...

I've had it happen 1 time, and the freezer trick worked.

A little ghetto cryo never hurt anything.

Wow. That's a new one on me. I wonder if some of our old hard drives that went cactus could be briefly revived using this trick?

Why does this work?

No one's got a correct answer. But the guess is that different parts freeze to different levels and the difference in size allows the parts to move freely again. And when they come back to normal temperature, they hit the part that was obstructing them in the first place.