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If you’re lucky, you can just copy your files and call it a day. Another option is booting off a Linux DVD or flash drive, and accessing the drive in place. One of the USB to SATA cables available on your favorite online store is a great way to recover data. A truly dead drive is a topic for another time, but if the drive is alive enough to show up as a block device when plugged in, then there’s hope for recovering the data. Don’t turn to one of these questionable fixes unless you’ve exhausted the safer options.įor the purpose of this article, we’ll assume the problem is the hard drive, and not another component like a power supply or SATA cable causing problems. The downside is the potential for condensation inside the drive. The temperature change can help with stiction, and freezing the drive could potentially help an overheating drive last a bit longer. This could actually be useful in a couple instances. Another trick I’ve heard repeatedly is to freeze a hard drive before trying to read data off of it. One of my favorites is the official solution to stiction for old drives: Smack it with a mallet. There are some legends and old stories about hard drive repair. Those backups are up to date, right? Right? The clicking sound coming from the tower probably isn’t a good sign either. Few things bring a creeping feeling of doom like a computer that hardlocks and then refuses to boot. It should have been another fine day, but not all was well in paradise.
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