Hard disk recovery - the freezer trick.

It wasn't actually a virus that infected my mom's hard drive, but some bad chips were overheating and causing everything to go haywire. The problems I had on my drive (that I tried to boot it with) were probably because of scrambled signals on the IDE line or something like that.

I'll get to the point: we found a way to read the data, and remarkably well too. According to several places on the internet (which I always trust) you can put the hard drive in the freezer for a few hours to make it cool enough to copy some files (and it turns out this actually works). Rinse lather repeat until you've got everything.

That was a bit slow for us. We had to copy a 350MB MS Outlook datastore (don't get me started) and it was overheating and failing before it could finish. So we came up with this:

Hard Disk on the rocks!

A hard disk, on the rocks. It's triple-bagged inside a bag of ice, and we had to press the ice up against the PCB side of the disk to keep it going. It would error as soon as we took the pressure off.

It's hard not to laugh—it actually worked! Combined with Knoppix, we copied all the important files to my 20GB iRiver (which automounted; did I mention the new version of Knoppix is awesome?). Tomorrow we'll figure out a better solution, probably including dry ice, to try to get the less important things off (pictures and music).

My hard drive is fine (not the failed one, but caught a bug from the one that did), I just have to rebuild the partition table. Checked in Knoppix and the data is still good. So all ended well. Just remember the freezer trick ;-)