I remember upgrading from a 4.3 GB HD to a 20 GB HD around 2001. I had the old hard drive sitting on my desk, and the new hard drive sitting in the case, both attached to the motherboard via IDE ribbon cables.
Most of the way through backing up the 4.3 GB HD to the 20 GB HD, I heard a screech and the old hard drive twisted slightly on the desk... conservation of linear momentum. The drive was visible to the BIOS, but refused to spin up after that.
I put the hard drive in a ziplock bag, put it in the freezer to give the parts slightly more clearance from thermal contraction, and slammed the hard drive nice and hard on the desktop to free the stiction. That revived the drive long enough to finish my copy.
I did have backups of all of the really important information, but restoring from a stack of floppies is more tedious, slower, and less fun than percussive maintenance on a hard drive.
Back when I had an internship working on MEMS gyros for GPS guided mortar rounds, we had to sometimes perform similar percussive maintenance if static electricity had caused the moving parts to contact the substrate. We took the gyro, and smacked it hard on the desk in an "eyeballs out" orientation to give it something like 10 to 100 Gs of acceleration in an attempt to un-stick the MEMS gyro.
Yeah, did same in 1999 or 2000, but we _did_ _not_ take the HDD from the freezer, just pulled the ribbon and power cable through the narrow slit between the door's rubber gasket and the fridge's body.
Most of the way through backing up the 4.3 GB HD to the 20 GB HD, I heard a screech and the old hard drive twisted slightly on the desk... conservation of linear momentum. The drive was visible to the BIOS, but refused to spin up after that.
I put the hard drive in a ziplock bag, put it in the freezer to give the parts slightly more clearance from thermal contraction, and slammed the hard drive nice and hard on the desktop to free the stiction. That revived the drive long enough to finish my copy.
I did have backups of all of the really important information, but restoring from a stack of floppies is more tedious, slower, and less fun than percussive maintenance on a hard drive.
Back when I had an internship working on MEMS gyros for GPS guided mortar rounds, we had to sometimes perform similar percussive maintenance if static electricity had caused the moving parts to contact the substrate. We took the gyro, and smacked it hard on the desk in an "eyeballs out" orientation to give it something like 10 to 100 Gs of acceleration in an attempt to un-stick the MEMS gyro.