On Sun Nov 14 9:10 , 'Rony Bill' ronbilly@hotpop.com sent:

Sometime back there was talk about freezing hard disk drives.

"An executive who froze his broken hard disk thinking it would be fixed has topped a list of the weirdest computer mishaps. "

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4003733.stm

Some years back I read a whitepaper from techrepublic.com about harddisk failures and what to do in such cases. Freezing a harddisk was one of things to try incase it won't spin up. The paper even mentioned of a hard disk that used to spin-up only when tapped on the side with a screwdriver, and stopped immediately. According to the report, the technician attending the problem continuously tapped the disk for two hours so that the client could transfer his data to another harddisk.