Aaron Feng

I am sad to say that the hard drive in my Macbook died a few days ago. When I boot up the laptop all I see is a blinking folder with a question mark on it which means that it can't find necessary files to startup up the OS. I tried to run the Disk Utility from the OSX install CD, but the hard drive isn't even mounted. To make matters worse, the last backup I had was from 2 months ago.

Right before the hard drive crash I was just starting to gain some momentum on my side project. Now everything is gone, including my motivation.

I poked around Apple Discussions and found out a lot of people are having similar hard drive problems. Some people were able to retrieve their data by sending the hard drive out to a data recovery service. I called one and I realized I'm in the wrong business! The price ranges from $1500 to $2000 if the data can be recovered.

In disbelief, I went to the all knowing god, Google, for answers. I came across a couple sites that have claimed success on temporarily "fixing" a dead hard drive by putting the entire drive in the freezer for a few hours. Supposedly this will allow the hard drive to function for 10 to 30 minutes depending on the condition of the drive. Sounds pretty bogus to me, but desperate time calls for desperate measures. I have nothing to loose, so I decided to give it a go.

I sealed the hard drive in a couple zip lock bags and left it in the freezer for 3 hours then I stuck it back into my laptop. I boot up the Macbook with the frozen drive, hoping it would buy me enough time to backup a few items. Just a few seconds into the boot process, I see the blinking folder with the question mark again. I repeated the process a couple of times without any success.

Freezing the hard drive is only my first attempt on recovering the data. I purchased an identical hard drive from ebay and am hoping to repair it by swapping out parts. More to come in the next post. Before I go, I just want to say If you haven't been backing up your data recently, DO IT NOW!