A wd2000 sata hdd would only start when “cold”.

I took it to the office, and after a few tests, it became obvious that the drive wasn’t going to last much longer.

I decided to put it in the freezer (made sure it was sealed in a plastic bag, to prevent condensation on the electronics when I took it out.

I’ve tried the freezer trick many times, but this is the first time its actually worked.

It works for between 2 – 8 minutes, then I hear a clunk, and the drive disappears from XP.

I had to re-freeze it about 15 times, before I could recover about 120Gb of data.

After the 5th re-freeze, I got sick of waiting for my PC to startup while the frozen HDD was thawing, so I decided to plug in the drive while the PC was running (sata cable first, then the power cable. Hey! it worked!

This gave me an extra 2 minutes of copy time for each re-freeze.

I then started to wonder if I could “hot plug” an IDE HDD while a PC is running?

Well, I tried it, but it didn’t work. Looks like SATA drives are nicer to work with when recovering data.