How to revive your dead Hard Drive?

If you have intermittently failing Hard Drive, your first step would be to backup all the important data you have there. Mechanical failures are often deadly, and the drive cannot be recovered without professional tools and facilities (clean room, for starter). But if it looks like dead, it does not mean that you cannot revive it, at least temporary. All you need just half an hour of temporary recovery to save all your valuable data. The article “200 Ways to Revive a Hard Drive” has been written long ago (in 2000) by TechRepublic specialists. Unfortunately, the eBook is not available from their web site any more. Still, it can help you in fatal failures, even thou some methods might look funny and unprofessional.

All solutions are divided into four categories:

• Freeze it
• Drop it
• Hit it
• The rest of the solutions

You can find different approaches and ways, and sometimes you can try several methods to get positive results. I have personally recovered several customer’s dead hard drives, using these “funny” techniques, and the last case was just two weeks ago.

Just remembers that by using these methods you might not reach any success at all, or even make things worse. So, apply them only when you have nothing to loose.