It's dead Jim! Or is it? I am a part time guitar/bass music instructor and use an old Dell PIII based system at the music store I work at to run Youtube, midi, audio, and a few vst/vsti plugins. The hard drive resides in a portable carriage rack so that I can take it back and forth from my home to the studio. Last week the hard drive fell out of my guitar case and suffered a 8-10 inch from the floor fall. When I got to the studio the system wouldn\'t boot up and the drive was not showing up in bios. Needless to say the fall resulted in adead hard drive. It is a high quality IBM 30 gig drived that was originally made in 2000. Anyhow over the years I\'d heard of the fremedy to rescue info from a dead hard drive such as mine by putting it in your freezer and then you only get one time to boot the drive and gather your info off it and then after that one time the drive will never work again.

I don\'t keep any valueble data on this sytem so it would not be a big loss if the drive were never again to work. But I always wanted an opportunity to try the freezer trick so the next day I put the drive in a plastic zip lock bag and stuck in the freezer overnight and a bit longer than 24 hours. Note some people say that you only have to leave it in the freezer for an hour or s but i had other things to do. Well low and behold I took the drive out of the freezer and put it in the system and booted it up and within minutes the system was running as if the whole incident had never happened. Fellow geeks warn me that I should expect the drive to not last too much longer. In any case it is a fascinating concept that you can take a hard drive and stick in a freezer and make it work? A broken hard drive for that matter. So go dig out that dead hard drive you may have sitting in geek scrap parts box. You do have a box of old computer parts sitting around don\'t you?