Another war story: My coolest recovery

My brother called me. Old PC, harddisk could only be read for about 5 min, then it was no longer able to find any sector. Of course, on a sunday, all stores closed. No spare parts at my brother's house or nearby. "I can try to recover what is readable, I've sufficient disk space on my server, and I should be able to find a spare disk." About two and a half hours later, he stood at my door. We very quickly found out that the harddisk stopped working at around 25 °C measured via SMART. It took about 5 min to get the disk that warm. So I searched my longest IDE cable and some power adapters to extend the power lines to the disk, then we put the PC case on a chair carefully aranged in front of my secondary fridge, placed the harddisk inside the fridge, and turned the fridge to maximum cooling. We added mains power, network cable, monitor, keyboard, started the PC and looked at SMART data. Way below 10 °C right after boot, and so we started to dd the entire disk to my server. It took some hours to backup the disk, and some more to copy the disk image to a "new" disk, but it did work. No data lost, thanks to pure luck.

Of course, the disk had announced its coming death by evil clicks and increased seek times weeks before, but nobody cared. And of course, there was no backup.

Alexander

Update: Fixed some typos found by soonix

--
Today I will gladly share my knowledge and experience, for there are no sweeter words than "I told you so". ;-)

In reply to Re: Have you ever lost your work? by afoken
in thread Have you ever lost your work? by harangzsolt33

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