"Karl Townsend" wrote in message

JOY, stuck dying drive in a USB portable case, then in freezer. it
fired up and i copied just a few K of data. A minute later i heard
the
whirring squeak and it breathed its last gasp.

A fella on RCM said a cold drive will run a bit, sometimes.

Karl

Thanks for the feedback.

I bought a CD bay hard drive caddy for this laptop to put the backup
drive on the IDE bus where it will show S.M.A.R.T. data, particularly
to see how fast the reallocated sector count is growing and how bad
the seek and write error rates have become. The free disk utilities I
have don't read S.M.A.R.T. from USB drives, including new SATA ones.

If like me you are still patching up your favorite 7-year-old laptop
and see the hard or CD/DVD drive suddenly become extremely slow, this
is how to reset the IDE bus from 2MB/S PIO mode to high speed UDMA
mode after multiple (6?) drive errors cue XP to slow it down.
http://www.sevenforums.com/general-d...-can-i-do.html

jsw