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 amazement disbelief, the machine booted up without any issues. I haven’t tried rebooting yet, I’m still waiting for all my data to copy.

I was very skeptical, but this actually works!