[OT] Hard drive recovery

[Jonathan Rockway]

Matt S Trout wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 17, 2007 at 06:27:48PM +0100, Robert Rothenberg wrote:
>   
>> A cooleague of mine's hard drive is fried, and she's looking for
>> organisations than can recover the data from it.  Is anybody aware of
>> services which are "not too expensive"?
>>     
>
> If you don't find any, there's always
>
> (a) the freezer

I've tried option a before with some success.  Back when I did desktop
support, someone had a dead disk (and of course no backups) and wanted
their data back.  We put the disk in a sealable plastic bag, poured
liquid nitrogen over it until the drive got cold, and then opened up the
bag and tried to get data from the disk.  It actually worked, and we
recovered most of the guy's documents.  Once it warmed up, though,
cooling it a second time didn't fix anything.  So work quickly.

Regards,
Jonathan Rockway