The following is a compendium of urban-legend data recovery techniques which we strongly discourage you from trying. Doing any of the following may cause further damage to your data, complicated data recovery efforts, or render your data unrecoverable.

Putting the hard drive in the freezer - This is one of the most common techniques we hear from clients who attempted to perform their own data recovery. 

The logic goes something like this:

• The drive is not spinning.
• The drive contains metal parts such as a spindle and bearings.
• If the drive will not spin, maybe it is stuck.
• If I cool the metal down, it will contract.
• After some time in the freezer, I will try to use the drive, hoping it will spin.

The reality:

• Freezing a hard drive may have worked once, or the time in the freezer may have done the same as just letting the drive sit. This is called spontaneous remission.
• Hard Drives are not sealed. All hard drives are open to the atmosphere. All hard drives have a breather hole with a small air filter preventing particulate from entering the drive. This is needed to allow pressure equalization in the hard drive case when the drive is moved to different altitudes.
• The air inside your drive when it is off is at the same temperature, pressure, and humidity as the ambient air. When your drive is in operation, the temperature will rise, allowing the air to hold more humidity.
• When you freeze your hard drive, just like anything else you put in the freezer, a thin coating of frost covers every component in the hard drive. This happens regardless of whether you place the drive in a sealed bag or use a desiccant like silica gel to attempt to absorb the moisture.
• If you apply power while frozen, the ice layer can be thinker than the fly-height of the heads, causing a head crash.
• If you let the drive warm up temporarily, the frost will melt, leaving a thin film of water coating the drive components. Eventually this oxidizes and turns to rust, or evaporates leaving a film of particulate. Spinning up the drive may again cause a head crash. This is always evident to our cleanroom engineers when the drive is opened.

Freezing a hard drive always results in the need for rebuilding in the cleanroom when in many instances cleanroom work would not have been necessary.

Making your own cleanroom - We see some interesting reports of how to set-up a makeshift cleanroom in a bathroom or closet.

The logic goes like this:

• Steam the room with the shower or faucet so the steam particles will presumably attach to any dust, then settle to the ground when the steam clears.
• Presumably clean and sterilize the entire room with cleaning products and bleach.
• Take apart the drive and swap parts, etc.

The reality:

• Cleanrooms are not just cleaned then used. They are built to a standard to maintain a maximum quantity of a certain sized particle in a given volume of air.
• While the above procedure may reduce the spread of the cold or flu, it does not make a workable cleanroom. The clean surfaces are only one issue. Steaming the air does not filter it. What happens when you open the door to enter your clean bathroom? How 'clean' is the air in the ante-chamber (hallway, bedroom, etc)?
• Any drive arriving in our labs with a broken warranty seal is treated as if it had been opened outside of a cleanroom. This necessitates rebuilding the drive in the cleanroom before any imaging attempt is made to avoid a possible head crash.

Banging the drive with a hammer, the floor, or some other tool.

The logic - Something in the drive is out of alignment.

If I tap the drive, the part will go back into place.

The reality:

• Hard drives operate at extreme tolerances. Components must be aligned at the micro level.
• A part of your drive may need physical realignment. Banging on a hard drive may move something in your drive, but the likelihood of moving the exact component the exact distance in exact direction is infinitesimal.
• The risk of causing additional problems far outweighs the chance of resolving your hard drive problem through physical force. 

Swapping printer circuit boards (PCB) - the logic follows:

• My drive will not spin, is clicking, or otherwise not behaving like it should
• If the problem is with the PCB, I can just find the same model with the same firmware, and swap the parts
• My drive, with the replacement PCB will function as if nothing ever happened.

The reality:

• Most modern hard drives do not have inter-changable PCB's once the are initialized at the factory.
• The PCB not only contains information common to all drives of the same make and model, many contain information specific to the individual drive. This information is commonly in the form of drive defect lists called the P-List and G-List.
• These lists contain information unique to the drive the they were originally installed on. Ever drive is made with excess capacity since not all blocks of the drive are operational, the drive maps them to other blocks logically. Blocks continue to fail over the life of the drive, and these bad blocks are subsequently re-mapped to the extra good blocks.
• When you apply the G-List and P-List from one drive to another, you are essentially swapping a map of one drive to another. This can cause everything from erroneous data reads to complete drive corruption.

Never swap PCB's unless you have confirmation the drive does not store drive-specific information on the PCB.