Freezing a hard drive for data recovery

Have you ever thought that freezing your hard drive might be a viable option for data recovery? I had heard idea before and read posts suggesting that it was NOT a myth and that it can help in some situations.

After trying a few tricks that have help me in the past like Ghosting or unsing a Linux Live CD, I was about to give up on a coworker's 1 year old iMac that would not boot anymore. The guys at the Apple Store (Actually Simply Computing) were unable to recover any of the data and returned the hard drive. After the few tries on windows, Linux and other Mac systems, but the drive would not let itself be recognize by any of the systems.

I decided to place the drive in the freezer for about 1 to 2 hour and booted my Ubuntu CD again. The drive was actually recognize this time and Ubuntu was able to browse it. Unfortunately, Ubuntu respected some of the security Mac OS had place in some of the user's folders and I was unable to get the data out of those folders but was successful on a good part of her data. The drive did stop responding after a few minutes (10 maybe). I proceeded to put it back in the freezer for another hour and got another 10 to 15 minutes out of it.

After successfully getting it up and running in Linux, I decided to put it back into a Mac and try to change the permission issues that I had on some of the folders. Again success but for only a short period. I proceeded to put the drive in the freezer again and moved the computer next to the fridge in the mean time... I was going to use an external case and keep the case in the fridge to keep the drive from disappearing.

Well to my surprise once more, the drive was now very stable and all of her data was finally recovered.
If you have ever doubted of the possibility to put a hard drive in a Freezer for data recovery, well it is possible...

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