Saving hard disk

Before I tell you what just happened to me a while ago, let me remind you this: if you see an Asian man trying to strangle a prostitute dressed as Wonder Woman to death in front of medical Marijuana clinic, don't use a hand gun to blow up his testicle and then shoot at his face.  There could be a reasonable explanation for such a scene.

What I just said has nothing to do with the story I am going to tell.  I just love dramatic situation.

So I woke up at around 6 pm by the blinking light of my mobile phone, and then realized that my room was in total darkness.  I sensed that something was wrong, and then realized  that the townhouse I lived at was out of power.  So I started packing up my electronic gadgets and planned on getting back to office so that I could work and entertain myself.  Just when I done with all my preparation, power came back again.  I thought, oh well, that would be it.

Then I started doing all my post-power-outage-procedures (started desktop MacMini, closet home server, reboot router ...) and finally came to realize one big problem: the 1 terabyte harddisk that filled up with movies was not working.  Yes, dead harddisk, classic modern day nightmare.

After spending a while trying to bring to hard disk alive, I was about to give up.  Afterall, everything in that hard disk has back up either in another hard disk or in some DVD discs.  It's just that it will be a pain and cost me a lot of time to put everything back to how the hard disk was before it died. Suddenly, something I read from Internet about how freezing an harddisk can resurrect a dead harddisk for a while.  I thought, I have nothing to lose, so I went a head and gave it a try.

In the first trial, I only froze the hard disk for 10 minutes, and it didn't seem to do anything.  Then I went further, froze the hard disk for half an hour.  This time, the hard disk started spinning up the second time (yes, the first time still failed) I plugged the hard disk in an external hard disk dock.  I knew I had to take this opportunity to rescue as many files as possible, cause there's no guarantee that this hard disk would spin up again once it went down.  So I started copying everything from this 1 Terabyte hard disk to another new 2 Terabyte hard disk.  In fact, the process is still going on right now, with 9% copied after 1.5 hours.  It will take a while.

So that's it.  Now look around and see if there's any Asian man around you.