“Why does a dead laptop revive after putting it in the freezer?”

(Answer requested by Edgar Ferrer)

Yikes! If this actually worked on your laptop, you’re very lucky.

The actual, true “put it in the fridge” advice is very old-school, and is/was a nothing-left-to-lose, last-ditch recovery option for malfunctioning spinning-platter hard drives.

Deep-chilling a mechanical drive could sometimes free up stuck internal parts, via differential contraction/expansion of the various metal components.

But this was never, ever a “try this first” thing — the risk of further damage to the drive was high.

And the idea was always to remove the drive from the PC before putting it anywhere! 🙂

I haven’t heard of anyone having to revive a hard drive by chilling in years and years; I suspect that modern HDDs just don’t fail that way much anymore.

But even if they do, putting an entire HDD-equipped laptop in the fridge runs the risk of causing even worse damage to the laptop screen and battery; both of which fare very poorly at low temps, and can be permanently damaged by below-freezing temps.

If your hard drive is well and truly dead — not spinning at all — and you have nothing left to lose, sure, wrap the drive tightly in airtight plastic (to keep moisture/condensation out), and set in in a quiet part of your fridge for several hours. Take it out of the fridge, unwrap it only enough to access the sockets, and reconnect it to a PC as an external drive. If it spins and starts, copy the data off the dying drive RIGHT NOW because it’s on its way out. If the drive still won’t start, rewrap it and let it fully warm to room temperature on its own. When it’s at room temperature, and the plastic is dry (no condensation), unwrap the drive and try again. If it works, you’ve bought a little time: Get the data off RIGHT NOW.

But at least, you’re gonna need a new drive. And if you put your entire laptop “in the freezer,” you’ll soon need a new laptop, too!

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