Submitted by: Doktor J via Submit a Kludge!
Favorite Comment: Fixer JB says, “The best way to thaw your popsicles! Never thought of it! Thanks for the tip!”
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i’ll take a red one please!
i want the green one
yum!
watercooling, ur doin it wrong
Now that it’s cooled off, they otter pop that hard drive back inside the tower before their computer freezes up.
@@@@@!!!!!!
The new koolaid graphixcard with surround rainbow vision support!
Hey, all my data is frozen.
Sticky bits!
That’s actually a recommended way of retrieving data from a failed/failing disk drive. The stiction caused by evaporated/recondensed internal oils would cause the read/write heads to stick to the platters. One solution was to take the drive out of the machine, place it in an airtight bag, cool it down to below zero, and then give the drive a quick strike. This would release the read/write heads and allow data to be retrieved.
Err, if it was really some oily residue that was causing the stiction, the last thing I’d do is freeze the disk. Oil gets thicker when cold, you know? Warming up the drive will help more (to about 60C/100F), as will putting it in a vacuum chamber (to re-evaporate the residu). DO NOT spin up the disk in vacuum, though.
But usually, simply abruptly turning the drive on the platter axis will loosen any stictioned heads.
I could be wrong, but I don’t think it has anything to do with oils. It has to do with the contraction of the metal when it cools. This can realign the parts for a last ditch effort of recovery.
Well, the oil bit came from the comment I replied to; I don’t subscribe to that theory either. Nevertheless, stiction is a real problem, and in the cases I’ve encountered it did have to do with the heads sticking to the drive platters (for whatever reason). But at least in the past five years, quite probably longer even, generally the heads don’t sit on the platter when the drive is powered down, they get retracted past the outside of the platter where the arms meet a plastic wedge, lifting the heads free. That would still leave the bearings as a problem source, but once those get to a point where stiction manifests itself, you’d better have a good, recent backup.
I had an Hitachi Travelstar disk drive (a.k.a. Deathstar laptop disk drives). “‘Her indoors” decided to fold the laptop up and move it to a sunny part of the room while she did the dusting. The hard disk drive fried and would just make a clicking noise when I restarted it (“Oh” she said, “It’s been making a funny grinding noise all day”) . Doing the freeze/bang/power up trick worked enough to get a full copy of the drive.
One of the dead drives I’ve disassembled failed that way. It took quite a bit of force to free the heads. But there shouldn’t be any oil in there; the platter spindle and head armature both use sealed bearings.
Just take the cover off of the HD & spray it with carburetor cleaner if you think the platter is oily.
Not sure why it works, but I’ve used similar methods to recover data from failing deathstars… Usually I’ll put the HDD in a couple ziplock’s, then stick it in the freezer for an hour or so though.
So Apple is an actual flavor?
Rocko told him to keep the info on ice, and that’s exactly what he intends to do…
Folks, this is why you make BACKUPS – So you don’t have to use “The Otter Pop Method” to get the data off. External hard drive, Carbonite is your friend, Drive $aver$ if all el$e fail$.
wonder what happens when the dew water gets inside the HD
(
wow, this brings back memories! totally saved a failed WD hard drive with this method a few years back. except i froze the drive and used full-on ice packs on top of it — had about 20-30 minutes to pull data off before i’d have to freeze it again! got everything off in two tries.
The best way to thaw your popsicles! Never thought of it! Thanks for the tip!
I used to do this all the time. Mind you, between my roomie and I, we had two toasty wireless dongles and two ice packs. Sounds great until you realise you need two ice packs each, to do refreezing rotation.
I think all repair shops should serve frozen treats while you wait. To bad this guy got the program started with Sno-cones, though.
Sometimes, ‘To bad’ is ‘too bad,’ as Huey Lewis sorta pointed out once.
Ah it dit dit dit dit doo-wah, wah!
i have done simmaler things to recover data from a failing drive we used the blue gel ice packs at a job i used to have repairing computers
finally a cooling system you can eat when it breaks down
This is much cheaper than water cooling and way better than air cooling
And a lot more colorful.
My Pentium Pro/Debian server has been inside a Lehel refrigerator for 10 years now. So I can say, linux doesn’t freeze
Of course not it’s a penguin!
LOL, fools.
Hard drive + condensation = magic smoke escapes.
Condensation is a b1tch.
absolutely agreed!
long ago i tried one of those solid state CPU coolers. i never imagined anything that hot on it’s heat sink could put out that much condensation!
that cooler spent less than an hour in use… when i noticed it was attempting to kill my puter.
to be more clear…
I never imagined such a small surface sandwiched between 2 HOT surfaces (it’s own heat sink and the CPU) could put out that much water!
That’s why he used the Bounty brand condensation absorption device underneath.
Seriously!! How did he not realize that this would get his hard drive WET?
On a related note, don’t put a big (room-cooling sized) fan too close to your case. Those things generate a pretty nasty magnetic field.
Why use electrical products to defrost Freeze Pops? They are not meant to be juice packets. I’ll have to call my friend Nanook, he is a fan of Cold Case.
The reusable ice packs, you know, the plastic bags full of blue toilet water, they work a whole lot better.
I wouldn’t want to lick one of those.
Yeah I get that a lot…wait, what were we talking about?
I eventually learned to forego trivial methods such as this for recovering data. I just have my wife hold onto damaged hard drive. Her built-in freon system keeps the temperatures at an optimal level.
onto THE damaged
need…sleep…or caffiene…
And a hotter wife.
Maybe this could work for Xbox 360′s.
What is your favorite flavor of Linux?
cherry!
lol – I hope you used some Arctic Silver 5 XD
Love the blue ones.
I hate those. Do you buy the big blue boxes or the yellow (tropical flavours) ones? I’ll trade you all my blue for your green and orange (50% green ones, 50% orange), or if the yellow box, green and dark yellow (mmmm fake pineapple). Deal?
I used to love eating those when I was a kid!
I personally use hot dogs for my laptop. They actually work surprisingly well.
I’m not sure that a hard drive really gets that hot that it needs to be cooled like that.
That doesn’t seem very S.M.A.R.T.
And it seems a little SCSI as well.
Ah, the intense gamers are getting younger and younger these days. Little Timmy was tired of over-clocking his system.
Oh, the Kool-Aid Man isn’t going to be happy when he see how you’re abusing his cold-hearted cousins, the Freeze Pop Gang.
Who would you want to cool a hard drive (or cd drive… whatever that is) like this? They naturally run cool enough not to need any cooling device.
maybe if you sit on it skittles will pop out too!
I see a rainbow of data loss in his future.
Are you sure that’s not a DEC Rainbow computer under the towel?
This really is kludging at its finest – two totally disparate things have been brought together in such an illogical way that it’s not entirely clear what the end result is going to be, since both the computer and the ice pops are going to be unusable in half an hour, tops. Maybe the task here is “make it look like an accident.”
Oddly enough, I’ve done this before on an old laptop’s power box. XD
LOL, kinda done this… only, I was using the frozen stuff underneath my laptop to cool the CPU when the fans were failing.
Sweet.
I did almost exactly that. I had a failing hard drive that was running really hot then would fail. Hooked it up to a usb adaptor, and put an ice pack on it and got most of the files off it.
I think you can do this once as a last resort to reclaim a dying drive, but I doubt it would last that long w/ the condensation issues!
“Dude! You’re gettin’ a multiple fruit-flavored Dell!”
Always hated those proprietary green clips, me.
I often freeze failing hard drives to recover the data but I tend to use the industrial freezer in the lab. This method might work but I just kicked my otter pop addiction.
It does look quite safe though. Moist electronics FTW.
Anyone else notice that it’s a Dell?
Their Tech Support will get better as soon as Dell freezes over. I hope I don’t get sued for that one.
FYI, this was an after-the-fact attempt at hard drive recovery… was enough to get things running long enough to get the necessary data. I know about condensation issues, which is why I used the paper towels. The drive was pretty much dead anyways, so if condensation fried it eventually, it wouldn’t be a big loss.
I didn’t expect this to be a long term solution, just needed to keep the drive cool enough to get like 10MB worth of important information off it. Popping it in the freezer didn’t keep it working long enough, so I needed a way to keep it cool while it was running, and the ice pops were the only thing in the freezer at work.
And yes, that was a drive from a Dell… mind you, it had been in rigorous daily service for 4+ years as a point-of-sale system (don’t worry, the important data is on a server that backs up nightly).
I used to use these to cool my Dell Laptop after it cooked by first drive. In fact, to salvage information for that drive, I just tossed it in the freezer, then fired it up, burnt as much to CD as I could before it locked up, then repeated.
If that’s not an attempt at HD data recovery, then someone is practicing their color codes in a “tasteful” way.
I used a popsicycle wrap on my wrist after I crushed it between the garage door latch and the back of my riding mower; I was backing the mower toward the garage and reached behind me to life the door. I had performed that maneuver successfully many times, but this time, it was dark and I pinned my arm. Crushed the bone a bit, just above my wrist. I don’t open the garage from the tractor now. I learned the hard way, yup.
I don’t want to be using popsicles for heat sinks when I do HV experiments. (usues it… ahh… this is going well…. short SPARK SPARK!!! AHH! oh yay, my popsicles thawed…)