Whining hard drive won't boot your comp? Try this.

If one day you turn on your computer and it starts making a sound like there's a kitten being crushed inside your computer, chances are your hard drive is dead or dying. If you're lucky and your OS starts, start backing up your files immediately. If you're unlucky like me, your hard drive is probably dead and didn't even give you a chance to say goodbye to your files.

This happened to me about two weeks ago. In my search for trying to find out what exactly happened, I stumbled across a forum post where the guy mentioned an odd trick to temporarily salvage the hard drive. I dismissed it, partly not wanting to take the chance, and partly because it just didn't sound right. (This is when I would link you, but because I only read it in passing, I didn't think to save the link).

The poster said to freeze your hard drive. Crazy right? After I bought myself a new hard drive and a couple external cases in order to properly back up my important files, I decided to give it a try. The hard drive was dead, I figure a little freezer burn wouldn't make things worse.

In order to ensure that it would stay moisture free, I threw the hard drive in a zip-lock bag. I left it in the freezer over night.

Since I had the external cases anyway, I plugged mine into one of my empty external cases. I would suggest this to you if you try this as well. I'm not sure what kind of window for thawing you have, but an external let me plug in the power and parallel cable within half a minute of taking it out of the freezer. You might want to wear gloves too, I almost gave myself freezer burn.

Give it a minute as it tries to start up. I guess mine was so completely frozen that at first it didn't even spin, so I thought I completely killed it. After that, it spun, the whining squeak was gone and Windows recognized it as a proper plug and play device. I pulled off my files with no problems.

I also turned it on and off a couple times to see how temporary this freezer fix was. It worked every time and as of now, it still works completely fine. Obviously, I don't trust it at all because it already died once, but I'm using it to store unimportant files in order to free up space on my other drives.

Of course, I can't guarantee any kind of success with your hard drive, but if you do have important files, freezing your hard drive might be worth a try.

Good luck.

Update: In order to further test the HD, I left it off while I slept and left it on all morning while I went to work. I wanted to simulate real computer usage. The hard drive died again when I got home for work. So basically, you have about 24 hours to do what you need to do with your frozen hard drive.