Home & Small Office Computer Guide

I realise that as I post this it’s getting close to April Fool’s Day but this tip is really quite genuine and it sometimes it does work. It’s not going to work every time but sometimes it does and so it really is worth trying.

All to often a hard drive in a computer fails and you lose the data it contained. Many people either don’t back up their data at all or don’t back up their data often enough and so when a hard drive fails - as it inevitably will - they lose all their data.

Usually the failure of a hard drive is the end - there’s nothing a computer technician can do but replace it with a new unit. However, sometimes it is possible to encourage a hard drive to come back to life just long enough for you to recover the most important data.

So how do you encourage it to come back to life and give up all those important records that it’s holding?

This is where I have to assure you once more that I’m serious, I have seen this four step process work.

1. Seal it inside a plastic bag - a zip-lock bag is the best.

2. Put that bag inside one of those plastic bags that motherboards come in.

3. Place it in the freezer for 40 minutes (yeah I know - it sounds totally crazy but it does work in some instances and if you want the data then this may work for you.)

4. After 40 minutes in the freezer take it out and connect it to a computer as a slave unit and then see if it will appear in Explorer. If it does then don’t waste any time in transferring the data to another hard drive.

If it doesn’t work for you then I’m sorry - as I said earlier, this process does not work for every hard drive that has failed.

by Stuart Livesey

In the last 10 days there seems to have been a mini surge in the number of computers coming into the shop with failed Western Digital 80 gig hard drives. Ironically the first one Rick, at the best computer shop in Hervey Bay, saw was his own office desk top and five or six others soon followed.

Each one of the hard drives that failed was built by Western Digital in 2003 and installed in machines in that year or early 2004.

When a hard drive fails there is very little if anything that anyone can do to repair it. Once it fails it’s gone and, in most cases, so has all the data that might be stored on it. There are some specialists who can recover lost data but their services are very very expensive.

These particular drives all came with a one-year warranty but no matter how long the warranty might be it only ever covers replacement of the failed unit - no hard drive warranty covers recovery of the lost data.

In one of the instances that came into the shop one family lost thousands of family photos and several years of research into their family tree.

You have to remember that hard drive failures are inevitable. Every hard drive will fail and the only way to protect your data is to back it up regularly. Back up at least weekly and don’t back it up to another sector on the same hard drive.