Recovering a Harddisk Using the Freezer

My portable harddisk had given way over the weekend, and i got an interesting piece of advice from a fellow member of the Slugnet Mailing List. He had suggested that i try and get it started one last time by placing it in a freezer for a few hours, in order to recover any important bits of data left from it.

i gave it a go then, more out of curiousity than anything else (since i had done a backup of the more important data a day ago and was generally satisfied). And what do you know? It worked wondefully! i was able to copy out the less important stuff from it as well.

One point to note is that i had to run the USB cable into the freezer to connect the harddisk so as to avoid having to take the disk out of the freezer just to mount it. Given the humidity of the region, the condensation would definitely have dealt it one final blow before i had a chance to attempt any recovery.