blue screen of death

the hdd totally craped out i cant get to it all all. so i through in a Linux boot disk and got a portable hdd and am just gonna transfer what i can save.

I can't remember where I heard this, and it may have been a dream, but it seems like I heard that you can put the drive in a ziplock bag in the freezer, and have some more luck retrieving data off of it...

actually I googled 'freeze hdd' and got this:

http://geeksaresexy.blogspot.com/200...over-data.html

haven't read it yet, but you might look through it... anyone heard anything about this?

Yar!, I've tried the freezer trick before. A few times. It fails more often
than not.

The two go-to apps for me for data recovery are 1) SpinRite and 2) Disk
Commander, part of ERD 2005 boot disk. Spinrite works well if the partition
is intact. If the partition is fuber'ed, SpinRite chokes. Disk Commander
works on disks with corrupted partitions sometimes. I've got two disks
I'm working on now before deciding to send them out. Am going to give
Parted Magic (open source) before doing so.

In my experience it all depends on what the problem is caused by. Where files have been accidentally deleted or the file table or MBR have been screwed up then there are tools that might help.

Here is a free one:

http://www.pcinspector.de/Sites/file...htm?language=1

a commercial one would be Active@

Where you have physical damage then it is more problematic. Unstoppable Copier by roadkil is the one I go for................. it takes a long time, but it does the best job, as it attempts to reassemble the original files, damaged or not.

http://www.roadkil.net/downloads.php

Check out the data recovery section.............. there are Linux and Windows versions :)

The freezer and spinning techniques sometimes work when the disks have become stuck. However this is no help if the motor has burnt out, the heads have crashed, or the drive's controller card has blown.