There is an old techie’s tale that if you literally freeze a dead hard drive, you can bring it back to life long enough to pull some data from it.
Recently I had the opportunity to test this, and lo, it works! I put a the deceased hd into a firewire enclosure, stuck it in a ziplock bag and into the freezer for a little over an hour. When I hooked it up to its original home with a firewire cable (new hd already installed with OS), nothing came up.
Undeterred, I popped open disk utility (Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility). Previously, while the dead hd was still in the laptop I had tried to mount it in target disk mode to another mac, and even used disk utility, but nothing would come up. This time, to my delight, disk utility found the chilled drive. I went to the First Aid tab and clicked the Repair button. It repaired the volume header.
Awesome, but after closing disk utility the drive still wasn’t there. Quickly I logged out and back in without touching the firewire cable. And there was the drive! At this point I knew the clock was ticking, but hubris took over. Rather than simply drag the contents to the new drive, why not use the migration assistant and get all of my settings back along with my data, without having to adjust anything?
Migration Assistant is in Applications/Utitlites/. Many people seem to think you can only use this during initial set up to pull over the settings from another computer. However, this little gem will pull over settings from any former os x system hard drive (maybe even os 9, not sure). You can put it in a firewire or USB enclosure; in a tower, install it on the system as a slave drive. Then just run the migration assistant and point it at the drive. I’m not sure, but I think it might even work from a folder on any volume accessible to the system.
So I ran Migration Assistant and pointed it at the external drive. It worked great for about 1/2 hour at which point the drive died again. But the assistant didn’t care. It put up a [Continue] button and waited patiently for me to toss the drive in the freezer for another hour. Sadly, I wasn’t even able to get it to show up in disk utility again. However, it had fully migrated my user account and data. It transfers applications after accounts, but didn’t get to them.
Probably I should have skipped the migration assistant and just dragged the whole thing to the new disk. The data would have come over faster, perhaps all of it, after which I could have used the migration assistant without a deadline and wouldn’t even need to reinstall most applications.
