The sudden and out of the blue discovery that a hard drive isn’t working can lead to people desperately trying to fix it themselves using pseudoscientific DIY solutions, often that they’ve heard through friends or on the internet. While it might seem like a good idea at the time, attempting an amateur data recovery can put the slim chance of a professional being able to recover the data at jeopardy.
An old myth is that freezing your hard drive can increase the chance of a successful data recovery. The idea behind this is that when a hard drive is frozen, the components will shrink, and when warmed to room temperature, they expand, causing the spindle to be released. While in theory this is true, putting your hard drive in the freezer can cause irreversible platter damage, and therefore data loss. Moisture may also get into the drive, reducing the chance of a successful recovery even further. (more…)