OT: Ever freeze a hard drive to get info from it?
 

I have a backup hard drive that is not spinning. It's a WD that was orig in a Lacie D2 firewire case. I hate WD drives and it sucks to know that Lacie put them in the D2 drive cases.

When I place it on its side (spine) I can hear it trying to spin. When I put it flat, it spins for about 1 sec and then stops.

I was told that if you place it in a bag and throw it in a freezer overnight, it may help. Probably something to do with gumming up the spindle enough to catch and spin or something.

I need to grab some sessions from this drive. I want to grab what I can but can't afford to bring it somewhere to have somebody tell me that i'm screwed. If i were to lose the files, it wouldn't be the end of the world but in the 4-1/2 years of recording bands, I haven't ever lost a file. Want to keep my record as clean as possible. The sessions on this drive weren't current sessions.

I did find a great deal on a 250GB Seagate drive. I plan on throwing this into the lacie housing as soon as I can grab the stuff off the old drive. I paid 90 bucks for the Seagate at BB. I will probably get another one to throw into the ezquest case that I also have.

So, if anybody has done the freeze thing, let me know. I can probably try and beat the snot out of it until it catches but that would be lame.

Thanks

Yes, I have done the freezing thing before when I worked Help Desk at a university.

It CAN work, but of the say.. 50ish times I did it, it worked once.

cool.

so, do I freeze it out of the case? do I then plug it into the housing with it still in the bag?

From what I found online, people have said their success rate was pretty good. I still want to try to get the info off without freezing but with the time I spent with it yesterday, I don't think it's going to be possible.

If you have a static bag, freeze it in that. If you don't, then just do it loose but if you can just makes ure you put it somewhere that it's not going to stick to something.

I usually let it warm up a LITTLE bit - generally because you know it's going to get hot pretty fast.. so I let it sit out for like at least 5-10 minutes, then whipe the moisture off, then plug it in. I'm just nervous about plugging it in with ice crystals on it.

right on man.

I will try it tonight.

I just realized that I have the following session on that drive:

Hootie and the Blowfish acoustic session
Avril Lavigne acoustic session
Jason Mraz acoustic session
Nickelback acoustic session
5 for fighting acoustic session
Counting crows acoustic session

If those get blasted to digital heaven, I won't lose sleep.

As well, I have Jordis' (first season rockstar) band's demos on there. All in all, I have about $30,000 of studio time/sessions that I may lose.

I'm dumb for not backing up this drive...not even to DVD. Stupid is as stupid does.

ass whipe!

I'm all about wiping the moisture off. ;)

I had a Lacie 1TB - yes, 1TB entirely full of stuff, and it died. Tried the freezer thing, but it did not work.

A company said they could get most of the stuff off for about a 1000 dollars, and I think it might be worth it.

Never buying Lacie again.

Eh, like I said, the stuff isn't current session material...just old files I wanted to keep. $1000 is waaay to steep for me.

I love Lacie drives. They are some of the only readily available drives that have the Oxford 911 chipset in them. Those are essential for running with Pro Tools. You can use other drives but I have never had an issue with the 911 chipset not being smooth with Pro Tools recording. Digi only supports drives with 911 chipsets I think.

The shitty thing about lacie is that you don't know what drives they are putting inside the cases. The one I am referring to was a WD drive.

(edit) Oxford chip being in the Lacie D2 and D2 extreme cases. I wouldn't touch the Porsche drives from Lacie for the lack of the chipset.

Here is where you got me. I don't know one from another, I just bought this massive drive and loved I had everything I wanted on it. (Mostly video converted from tapes to digital and all my brothers college football games, real setimental stuff I would likely pay to try to get back.) Backing up 1TB was tough.

I have a hard drive that won't boot up in the middle of summer if it is too humid in the house. I put it in the freezer for 5 minutes and it fixes it every time.

i think it was routerhelp who had the big HD issue around here recently... it was the impetus i needed to go by the external HD (well actually i bought the internal and a case), to back up my music collection and a couple various other things (transvestite midget porno mostly). I cant believe how crazy-high the prices were from the data recovery places.