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Recently, my old Toshiba Satellite A10 laptop became unusable. It wasn't that the operating system had become corrupt, nor was it the overall speed of the computer. The problem was evident from the moment I turned the laptop on. The hard drive had failed. Rather than the smooth, whisper-quiet buzz that I was accustomed to the hard drive making, a great whirr sounded from within the laptop. It wasn't entirely unexpected as the laptop was almost ten years old, but it was more than just a little annoying because I had only just finished uploading hundreds of photos from my digital camera the previous day. The digital camera was now empty and so, it seemed, was the hard drive.
It's a problem many of us have faced in this digital era. Gone are the days of taking our roll of film to the camera shop for development. Now, all we need do is copy hundreds of photo files once every so often from our new digital cameras to our computers via a USB cable, view them on the computer screen and forget about them for a year or two until reason takes us back to look at those images once more. Unless our computers fail in some way, and we haven't made backups of those files. Having been in IT for ten years, you would think I would have known better. A backup should have been made or, at the very least, I should not have deleted those photos from my camera until I was certain they were safely on my computer. Well, they were safely on my computer, and the thought that the hard drive would fail in the next twelve hours just didn't cross my mind.
So what causes hard drives to fail? Most of the time it's just one thing - heat. Heat generated by either 5 volts or 12 volts of electricity along with a hard drive platter spinning madly at 5400 or 7200 revolutions per minute is enough to ultimately damage the insides of your hard drive. It may not happen tomorrow, it may not happen for another 5 years; but eventually it will happen. Most of the time there is no warning. The first indication you may receive that something is wrong is when the computer stops it's normal boot process and displays a message on the screen saying, "Insert boot disk in drive A and press any key to continue". Or, in my case, a whirring, scratching noise coming from the hard drive.
So is your data actually lost? Not necessarily. Remember what I said about heat? Well, what if you could lower the operating temperature of the hard drive? I removed the hard drive from my laptop and placed it in the freezer overnight. The next morning I placed it in an external case, plugged it up to my desktop via a USB cable ... and still it didn't work. My reasoning was the temperature was not low enough. So I put it in the freezer again and turned down the temperature in the freezer until it could get no colder. I left it there for weeks. My wife was getting upset with me because everything we removed from the freezer was rock-solid for days before it thawed. After some four weeks, I was satisfied that the hard drive was now cold enough for it to potentially start working when I returned it to the hard drive enclosure. But even that wasn't enough to satisfy me. Once the hard drive was safely in the external enclosure, I placed the enclosure in a container of ice so that, even while the hard drive was running, it would not be heating up too rapidly. This, I reasoned, would give me enough time to copy all my photos off the hard drive.
It worked. I discovered further troubles, however, when I realised I didn't have access to the files. Why? Because I didn't own the files. Sure, they were mine, but my user account on my desktop and my user account on my laptop are two entirely different entities as far as Windows is concerned. So I had to take possession of each file. Thankfully, this didn't have to be done separately. I could take possession of the photos as a group. When I was done, I removed the enclosure from the ice, and immediately the whirring, scratching noise returned. The hard drive had failed again. This time, it was for the last time. I still have it somewhere, but with my photos safely on my desktop (and backed up), it doesn't need to be sitting in the freezer any longer.
Will this work for you? It might. If your hard drive is making the same whirring noise that I have described, there's a good chance. Unfortunately, heat is not always the problem with hard drives, and different failures have different results. I know of many who have had to take their hard drives to specialist laboratories to recover their data. Make sure these files are worth a lot to you, because these labs charge a minimum $AU800 to recover your files.
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