While working normally recently, I left my workstation to get some coffee. When I returned, I had a blue screen and my hdd was making a click-click… click-click sound. All attempts to reboot were unsuccessful, even in other good casings; the drive was apparently unreadable. Someone told me to try the “freezer trick:” I put the drive into an external enclosure and froze it overnight. Next day, I plugged the usb from the bad drive into my laptop and the SOB started reading it! It’s still not bootable, but I was able to copy all personal files onto the laptop with no glitches. 99% of the files were backed up anyway, but what a relief on the other 1%. Everyone I tell this story to looks at me like I’m an idiot. Has anyone out there had success with the freezer trick? Oh yeah, and does anyone know what file extensions I should ‘search’ in order to copy Outlook emails, address book, and IE/Firefox bookmarks, since I obviously can’t “export?” Either way, what an interesting option… and I have know idea why it worked…
