ever thought about *FREEZING* your harddisk?

[SteveMcqueen]

one of my IDE hdds was classified CAPABLE, but status BAD by the S.M.A.R.T. stuff when i booted this morning. it also said: backup and replace. press f1 to continue...

my win xp as well as the linux system with which i am online ATM would not boot after i f1-ed. because the boot manager which lets me choose between xp, ubuntu and vista was on the fooked up harddisk.


well, i was kind of bored and figured 'what the heck', as i've read about putting a broken hdd into the freezer, freeze it, plug it back on and give it a shot.
put the thing into a closed plastic bag and put it into the cold.
after like 4 hours i took it out, put it back on (not inside my case, because cold hdd + water in the air = condensed water on hdd), and voila: boot menu was back there again.

i wasnt able to boot the xp system (took like ages), but ubuntu worked. (YEAH)
(a smart idea could be like setting up a knoppix system on a usbstick, in case you do not have another system to work on. you better do that in case u dont have a second OS and: DO THAT BEFORE U GET THE HDD OUT OF THE FREEZER! TIME IS SHORT WHEN UR HDD IS FUCKED AS IT GOTTA BE KEPT COOL. you better get everything set afore, because every reboot could be the last one for the drive...)

i had my ubuntu to begin with: it started after a reboot because of a file inconsistency, but afterwards the system ran. i had access to all the files of the hdd, as well as to all files in my user.
IIRC it could be a problem if u try to get access to user-directory-related files via another windows. it's certainly gonna tell you about having insufficient right you have... and lets you do nothing.

right now i'm backing up the REALLY essential files, and i am REALLY bored, so i'm typing this here.
because copying takes very very very ... very long. the bigger the file the worse it is. like almost 10 seconds for 0.1 mb. could be that the drive is too cold, but IDC as long as i am able to get my important stuff off off it.

another guy of have read about in a forum told me, he gets like 2 out of 3 drive to revive after shockfrosting them.
THIS IS NOT A RECOMMENDATION FOR REALLY ESSENTIAL FILES, AS IT IS LIKELY THAT PROFESSIONALS WONT BE ABLE TO REBUILD YOUR DRIVE AFTER IT WAS FROZEN AND WARMED UP AGAIN.
and by professionals i talk about the guys charging like 1500€+ for getting your data off the hdd.

hope this could be helpful for someone reading this crap.

[Unclefragger]

never tried putting a HDD into the freezer, nice thing ^^
but for the bootmanager you can just use any livecd (almost all of them come with grub) and edit the entries with 'e' to point them on your local harddisk. I think only your XP disk (with the bootmanager ^^) died there, so using grub from a live cd should have helped you. I wish you best luck with your backup

[SteveMcqueen]

backup worked great.
(i've seen this all coming and did some backups of the greater parts so i just had to get the stuff that i had changed very recently.
hadnt i done this, i would not have had enough time to copy everything because the drive was operating so slow... phew.
what is the saying like? DATA not backed up is to be considered deleted.)

i had the hdd runnig for like 1,5 hours and the the occasional clack-clack turned into that horibble clack-clack-clack-clack-clack-clack-clack-clack and my disk was dead.
freezed, i rebooted my comp and it didnt show up in the bios anymore... timing is everything.
the time window for freezing escapades is like from 15 minutes to 2 hours, depending on how broken the drive already is and how cold it is.

i know i could have gotten over the problem with the GRUB the way you described, the linux system i was on when i made my first post, was also on that hdd, you see.
before i had taken it into the cold, completely nothing on the drive showed up, even though it was visible after booting. (tried it with knoppix from a usb-stick as soon as i realized what was about to happen.)

the cold did some black magic and i could access it again (without having to dig deeper into it all and fixing the bootloader.)

gl to everyone who might have to try this as a last shot.

[Unclefragger]

thats why I use raid systems whereever I don't want my data to die ^_^

[SteveMcqueen]

raid 0 eh? --_--

[Unclefragger]

do I look that stupid
raid 10 (or was it 01? not 100% sure but I think 10 (I changed the configuration once ... on setup )) and 5

[SanHolo]

I'm glad I have TimeMachine with OS X.

[AimMe]

I'm glad that Ubuntu doesn't destroy my hardware.

[SteveMcqueen]

new ubuntu is quite cool... setup everthing in like two hours... when i remember what it was like a year ago... OMFG
oki, i had an ati gpu back then.......^^

raid 0 is both hdds share the information = if one disk breaks all is lost. in other words... kinda bad for backing up...
raid 1 is simple duplexing or mirroring
raid 5 is like... damn too lazy to explain, google that , but IMO its the best
raid 0+1 is like raid 10... works oki, but raid 5 is better...(cheaper plus maybe faster, depending on the number of drives u have)

wursti, what is your opinion on the matter? =D

[Unclefragger]

you are not trying to explain to me what a Redundant Array of Independant Disks is, are you? lolz
I'm familiar with that topic. Saying RAID 5 is the best is ... well let's say it's good but ... every RAID configuration has its place to be. If you use some 10 HDDs you might want to use RAID 6 (if you have no idea what that is now google it up )
Always depends on what you want to get. If you want much usable space at a low cost raid 5 might be the best for you yes, if you want performance (and not just kill your files) you better go with RAID 10.

I just wasn't sure if I mirrored the striped disks or striped the mirror in my configuration (didn't check it till now either)