A friend of mine has a laptop that won’t boot windows… he took it to a local computer shop and they said they couldn’t fix it or recover the files… This is how I helped him, with the aid of my freezer!

Freezing the Disk

The laptop drive was removed from the computer, and I used a IDE to USB adapter to connect it to my computer. To begin with, the drive only lasted for a few minutes before it started to constantly click – like the heads were going back and forth – a sign of a failing and failed hard disk!

I put the disk in my freezer overnight, and then tried again – this time I was able to copy 60Mb of files before it died – there was gigabytes of data to restore, so I thought I was out of luck. I then thought about connecting up the disk whilst it was in the freezer – thinking that once it’s spinning up the disk will get quite warm and the benefits of the cooling will wear off.

So I connected the drive whilst it was in the freezer and it worked! I’ve been able to copy gigabytes of data from teh drive, all in one go.

Frozen Disk (photos)

Here is a photo of the drive, wrapped an anti-static bag and then in a sealable sandwich bag – so as to keep moisture out, see it among the frozen peas and pizza!

Disk in freezer

Here is the drive connected to the laptop, note I did have the door close whilst copying the files!

Frozen disk drive connected to laptop