Alright. So here is the dilemma.

The other day I was drawing on my computer, my niece and nephew are watching me because they have nothing better to do. My niece knocks my external hard drive off the computer tower with her knee and I tell her to move. She does, but about five minutes later she goes back and immediately her knee knocks my hard drive off the tower again, it hits the metal legs on the desk and my music playing off of it starts to skip. I get her out of the way and put the hard drive back on the tower. And it seems to work fine. I go back to drawing.

Later on I try watching a movie off of the hard drive and the entire computer locks up. Then as I’m listening to music a few specific tracks stop working, and the light on my hard drive turns red.

Tonight I tried to do an error search, but that caused and error. Then I tried defragmenting the hard drive, but that locked up the computer.

If I drag any of the jacked up files to my desktop it gives me an error which reads "Cannot copy [file]: Invalid MS-DOS function”

Right now it looks like I need to buy another hard drive and salvage the working files. Though I’m just wondering if any of you know about this kind of thing. Like if I can somehow fix this.

thanks for your time.

Put it in the freezer for a few hours, you might be able to get it working long enough to get data off it.

I'm serious.

My dad suggested that. I plan to do it if I need to buy a new hard drive I can put the data on.

If it is dead, the longer you screw with it the less it's going to work. Especially if it's close to a full-on head crash.

If you have another drive of the same or very similar model (i.e. same product line) you can try transplanting the platters from the defective drive to the working drive. With any luck it'll work for years, but no one seems to think it's a good idea to let dust into a hard drive and then expect it to be reliable from there on out. It would be good enough for you to get your data back.

More like that's a near 100% way to kill the drive permanently. Please God tell me you were joking.

Uh, no. Why would it kill it? Just be careful not to scratch the disk against the heads. You hardly need a clean room to work with a hard drive. You know most of them have air holes to equalize pressure? It's not that big of a deal.

And obviously, what I was suggesting was a last resort.

emon i'm pretty sure that won't work. you do have to have a clean room because a speck of dust is enough to move the heads if they went over it. pretty much if you open the drive it's ****ed.

they do have vents to equalize pressure, but they have filters over them so dust cant get in.

Exactly. Even one spec of dust is enough to pretty much destroy the hard drive. The dust will get caught on the heads (because the heads actually are much closer to the surface than the width of the dust) and will cause the head to crash.

Uh, yeah, you do. Even smoke particles are too big.

Did uncle seraph get in a rage?

You mean like a zombie virus?

Of course if you expect it to last, you do.

People have done this on many occasions, or similar things like putting windows in hard drives. Some of them last, some of them don't. Take a look.

You can use your bathroom as a pseudo-clean room to increase your chances. Turn on the shower all the way with hot water, make sure any exhaust fans are off. Let the room fill with steam, then turn the shower off and wait a good, LONG time for all the mist to settle. It takes a lot of the dust out of the air with it.

You'll also notice how those articles all state an incredibly high likelihood of not working whatsoever. Even SH/SC tells you it's a stupid idea. Any chance of getting data off that drive go out the window if one spec of dust or fingerprint gets on the drive.

If the data is so important to you to sacrifice not one, but TWO drives, you might as well ship it to a data recovery company.

Right, as I stated it would only be a last resort. I'm not telling him to do it, I'm telling him that it's an option.

And read a few of those links. People have gotten fingerprints and dust on their platters and were still able to recover data. Hard drives are surprisingly robust. Probably because they have traditionally had such a high rate of failure, that in recent years (the last decade) they have been so over engineered that they've become really tough.

For example, it's not true that hotter drives die faster. On the contrary, the ideal temperature for a drive is around 55 C. That's about the tip of the bell curve.

Wouldn't last be sending it for data recovery?

I bought a new hard drive. At this point I'm moving all of the files that survived over to it. I've been putting the old hard drive by my bedroom window, and since it just snowed it's been chilling well. I'll probably try the freezer thing as a last resort.

Then if all is lost, I'll just mold the whole think into some jell-o.

Well, yes, if you want to pay the money.

what does putting the HDD in the freezer do?

Magically makes it work. Honestly.

I don't really know, at least not off hand. It's supposed to help with certain mechanical problems, e.g. click of death.

It makes the metal parts contract. And then a magical fairy sneaks into your freezer, and restores all of your damaged porn.