Paul Kuliniewicz

For October Break, I’ve gone home to St. Louis. The drive was pretty uneventful; I even seem to have missed out on most of the orange construction barrel harvest.

I have, however, already performed a computer-related miracle while at home.

My aunt’s computer is currently at my parents’ house, undergoing recovery from a “virus = very yes” type of failure. My dad had copied all the important data off of it onto an external hard disk in preparation for doing a full reinstall of the OS. Unfortunately, that hard disk then decided to be tempermental, blue-screening any Windows machine it was plugged into.

Linux to the rescue, right? Initially, kryten seemed to have no problem mounting the drive, the only complication being having to manually tell it the filesystem was NTFS, which apparently doesn’t get tried in “auto” mode. But after a while, the disk would audibly clunk and after a little while stop responding entirely, needing to be power cycled. Rince, lather, repeat. The mean time between power-on and failure kept shrinking each time, soon getting to the point where you could barely do a few directory listings before clunking.

But I still had one ace up my sleeve: the freezer trick!

It turns out, if you have a failing hard drive you need to recover data off of, sometimes you can stick it in the freezer for a little while, and that will buy you some more time to grab your data. I first heard about this trick a few years ago from one of my coworkers over the summer, who had used it to recover data from another drive on its last legs. Lo and behold, it actually does work: I managed to grab 3 GB off of it with nary a problem.

Not only can the freezer trick save the day, but it also elicits some strange looks from the people who see you stick a hard disk in the freezer. Of course, I wouldn’t recommend it on a drive that isn’t on the verge of total failure, since once you take the drive back out you probably run the risk of condensation getting inside the case, and that’s bad. But if you’re minutes away from having a platter-filled paperweight, you don’t have much to lose.