If All Else Fails

June 21, 2009 – Day 171

Further to my picture and journaling of June 15th, Ken spent many more hours trying to fix my computer this week. After trying all the previous fixes, he finally decided to delete all the information from my C: drive and reboot the operating system. Once he did that, things still weren’t working well and it was only then that he was able to narrow the problem down to the additional hard drive that was installed in my computer.

Ken tried the problematic hard drive on his computer and it wouldn’t work on his either so his next step was to run recovery software programs on it. He tried a few different programs with no success. I had pretty much resigned myself to the fact that I had lost all the files on that drive but Ken woke me up this morning, excited to tell me that he was able to recover them! I was thrilled, yet had a hard time believing it was true!

The “secret” was something Ken had read online – if all else fails, put the hard drive in the freezer. He had put it (in a plastic bag) in the freezer and left it there overnight. Lo and behold, it was working fine this morning!

However, after about an hour of being installed on the computer, it “died” again. And my heart sank…again.

Ken put the hard drive back in the freezer for a several hours. As it was refreezing, he went to Best Buy to buy a new external hard drive. Once he returned, he connected my laptop to the hard drive that was in the freezer (which is in the garage), plugged in the new external drive to the laptop and put some heavy “weights” on the freezer to ensure that no warm air was able to get in through the space around the cord running out from the hard drive inside. We were able to successfully back up all the files from the frozen hard drive on the new external drive! I am amazed!