Saturday, December 23, 2006
HOW TO: Recovering Data From HD Failure — Just Freeze The Drive!
As I was about to pack up and leave work for the Christmas vacation, I undocked my laptop and placed it into my bag. I forgot to send an email so I pulled it back out and redocked it. The computer started up fine, loaded Windows and then froze. I rebooted and that’s when I saw “1781 Disk 1 Failure” on the screen, right after BIOS post. My stomach sank, I knew it wasn’t good.
Since everyone was already gone for the weekend, I packed up and went off to buy some last minute Christmas gifts. When I got home, I tried powering it up again and it displayed the same error message. I googled, “HD Failure” and the first link was this. It recommended removing the hard drive and placing it in the freezer anywhere from 2-12 hours. I placed the drive in a ziploc bag and put it in the freezer (see above photo). After about 8 hours, I put it back in and to my
I was very skeptical, but this actually works!
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COMMENTS
Danny,
Very interesting. I had my suspicions that your “hard drive failure” was just a clever ruse, devised to allow you to leave early on friday without filling out your timesheet.
This story has confirmed those suspicions.
Safely away from the office, you now needed a miraculous hard drive recovery story to explain how your work was not lost afterall.
“just pop it into the freezer”
OK.
Bearings are shot, I’ve done this a few times for teachers who never back up their stuff and I get the “OMG all my grades are on there!!”.
Hopefully this little lession will remind you to back up your data. An external hard drive is far cheaper than data recovery service.
Also, you should be aware that this only works with certain types of disk failures, and this “trick” only works a fraction of the time.
Glad it worked out for you!
I cannot believe that worked. I’m inclined to go with the explanation provided in the first comment.
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