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That's fascinating, I've never heard of hard drive data recovery using liquid nitrogen. Is the idea that the lower temperature prevents the drive from overheati

That's fascinating, I've never heard of hard drive data recovery using liquid nitrogen. Is the idea that the lower temperature prevents the drive from overheating long enough to recover the data? Sounds very cool.

teddyh 4y ago
I would guess that the hard drive platters seized, and the cooling made it shrink enough to un-seize.
- u02sgb 4y ago
  Yes, have used a similar technique of putting the drive in the freezer. Didn't believe it would work, surprised when it did.
  - rbanffy 4y ago
    I was watching Fringe at the time. I felt a bit like Walter interrogating a corpse while doing it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99Sk2ZnjGQA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99Sk2ZnjGQA
    - mjhagen 4y ago
      “I need the body” is still a running gag between me and my partner.
      - rbanffy 4y ago
        My wife was very impressed with my ability to make dead disks talk.
- Jaruzel 4y ago
  In older drives, a lot of failures were down to the heads actually getting stuck on the platters. By freezing the drive, the metal would shrink just enough to unstick the head. Of course the location where the head crash had happened would be corrupt, but the rest of the data would be fine (mostly).
- randombits0 4y ago
  I literally squeezed the data out of a drive once. 40M Connor, one of the first IDE drives. If I squeezed it too much, “Data Error, Abort, Retry, Ignore”. Too little? Same result. Just right? In like Flynn! I spent 40 minutes copying that drive, got every bit back. Boss asks, “What are you doing?” “I’m milking the data out of this drive!” ;)