Shoutbox

I think doing what MeEtc suggested (the HDD freezing) is the worst what you can do.

As linx05 said, if you get the drive out of the freezer there will always be air condensing, aka tiny water bits will be all over the electronics. If you want to short circuit everything, including possible your computer electronics, go ahead...

I never heared of this method... I also don't see why it even would work at all. Magnetism isn't going to be suddenly higher or whatever when you freeze a magnetic plate, if that is what this is based upon. When you freeze conductors the resistans will be lower (but then again this is for extreme low temperatures, at just -10°C or whatever there wont be any significant difference at all), but what this has todo with suddenly being able to read the magnetic fields again, I dunno...

I am very curious where you heared this.

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PS: also attempting to do Chkdsk /F in cases like this will probably makes things worse!

The first thing you need to do in cases like this is getting the HDD out and putting it in a system which you know works 100%. But do not run any disk fixing tool (and certainly not crappy chkdsk!!). See if you can get your hands on software which can read drives in a low level pure physical way. You might need to do manual searching and stuff for data on the disc though.

The reason why you should not run any fixing tool at first (and certainly not chkdsk) is that such tools write stuff back to the HDD. But almost all fixing tools will not be able to read such faulty drives.

So what they will do is writing data back to the HDD in an attempt to make it readable again and in doing so they will overwrite the data which was on the HDD before (but which they can't not read and thus don't know it even exist, hence why they simply start writing as if nothing is there anyways).