This past weekend, after six months of procrastination, I finally got around to moving 2 hard drives into my new computer system.  I was super excited to have access to my 46GB of music files, all my digital camera pictures from years past, and a whole slew of 800GB of data stored across two drives.  I installed the drives, and I received what ever computer expert dreads – “the click of death.”

Normally, when you turn a computer on, the hard drive begins spinning and the head in the hard drive responsible for reading the magnetic platter starts going up and down to find where on the platter it’s current location is.  The click of death in simplistic form is when the head cannot find it’s location and hits the middle of the platter and then the outside usually 3 times.  After three times it pauses, tries again, and if your not so lucky makes 3 more clicks and then locks itself in position to prevent further damage.

I was extremely disappointed, having forgotten what was on the drive completely, I was worried, I immediately went to my backup server and looked – it appeared I had all the files!  Thank god!  Let that be a lesson to all – do regular backups!  Do them EVERY night! When you think you have enough backups, do more.  When you’ve done that try and restore one of your backups!  Make sure they work.  I cannot tell you how many times I have seen people a) not do backups b) not test the backups c) have only one backup that ran AFTER something devastating happened in essence rendering it useless.  Data recovery is expensive.  It cost anywhere from $500 on a drive that is working to $2,000 on a drive that is physically broken.

So knowing that I was in no immediate danger I stuck to all my normal tricks for data recovery – nothing would work!  So I figured now it’s time to go with the not so orthodox methods of data recovery.  I.E. Hitting the hard drive, freezing the hard drive, and finally a new one I just found out about – boiling the hard drive.

WHAT?  Hitting the hard drive?  Freezing it?  Are you crazy!?!?!  Well, yes, but that’s besides the point.  Having worked in server environments before these are often tricks that you learn.  You have to understand in always on computer environments the drives are always spinning which causes heat to sometimes affect the magnetic platter.  The theory is heat causes things to expand, cold causes them to contract.  These drives were in an always on computer environment.  My main theory was something happened with the platters that was causing the head to be stuck.  What if I could get the platters to be in their exact condition from when they were running a few months back?  I could get the system to recognize the drive and begin immediately copying it to another hard drive thus saving all data.

Well, first I froze the drive.  I wrapped it in paper towels to prevent condensation and put it in the freezer for 15 minutes.  I have had success doing this before on a drive that was unreadable and giving clicks.  I was able to freeze it, boot it up, and recover data effectively with minimal loss.   Next, I tried gently bumping the side of the hard drive with a screwdriver to see if I could get the head loose.  No luck either.  Finally, I read an article on mandible titled “How I recovered my hard drive by double-boiling it”.  I figured, I’ve heard some crazy things that have worked before – why not try it!  So as you can see in the video…..I boiled my hard drive using a homemade double boiler!

First off, don’t try this on a drive you absolutely need the data off of!  Please see my paragraph about backing up.  I am sure there is a much higher change of destroying the drive than recovering the data doing this – so if you must recover the data from the drive, go seek professional data recovery assistance.  As far as if it worked for me or not – it didn’t.  I had very high hopes – and it was a disappointing Saturday all around for me!  I’ve had success with the freezer method before as well as some other crazy ones!  So maybe on a different drive, on a different day it would have worked…..