The good people at We Are EarthFormedposted a nice article about backing up your hard drive. But what if you get to the point where the drive is no longer being recognized at boot. The dreaded hard drive death is in effect and your most sacrid files are gone forever.

Well they might be hope for that hardrive. With a bit of crazy ideas and hopelessness I will tell you how I recovered my files from a dieing hardrive.

First things first, remove the bad hard drive out of the computer… is it extremely hot? Well most likely that’s why it died. If you dont want this happening again I suggest you find some better ventilation for your hardrives. For me it was because they were stacked too closely together… If there is room for a fan in front of your drives (most new cases have drive cages with a fan mount in the front) and there is no fan there, PUT ONE. Seriously, this is the heart of your computer…well I dont know what organ it is… certainly not your appendix, your hard drive is needed.

Once your set on cooling and you have the broken drive out we need to cool it off. Most likely its died because it got so hot, the metal started to expand and moving parts started to fail. Trust me, the drive is dead. Even if you get it to work again, dont trust it. We still need the data off of the drive however. In order to get this back to working we need to get the metal in the drive back to size, or if anything SMALLER. Why? Because it has a chance of moving properly if its contracted. Put the drive in a freezer bag (ziplock heavy duty will work here) and throw it in the freezer. Yea I know.. its not a tv dinner, but this will cool the parts down enough to get the drive to spin. After a few hours (im gona be safe here and tell you to leave it overnight. Make sure no moisture can get in the bag.. This means to let as much air out of it as possible and zip it up TIGHT. The next day we can get to work. Take the drive out of the bag and get an icepack. Grab a large bowl and set it next to your computer, put the icepack on top and set the drive on the ice pack UPSIDEDOWN. Plug in the drive and if your lucky, it should recognize.
Neat huh? Well work quickly, as the drive spins your creating heat. iF anything I recommend running dos/linux from a cd or flash drive because any extra use of that drive is going to give you less and less time. If you are quick, you can grab the files you need.

I did this once with a fan on full blast, and ice pack and the bowl trick. Make sure when your doing this not to block the tiny hole at the top of the drive, thats actually a vent.