January 06, 2005
Hard drive dead? Freeze it.
My wife is a developer on the Visual Studio Core team working on the VS editor. Shortly after getting on her dev box this morning she heard the much feared 'clicking sound' coming from her machine. The hard drive had died. The same hard drive with a few days worth of code that she was planning on checking in this morning. Some folks on the team proceeded to joke with her a bit but never too much as we all know there's probably no worse feeling than having to code the same thing twice.
But then someone suggested she stick the hard drive in the freezer. She wondered if they were just trying to get her to try to get her to do something extremely dumb out of desperation. She figured there wasn't much to lose at that point so she stuck it in the freezer and left it there for a couple hours. At first, it didn't work. But after about thirty minutes of thawing, that 80gb wonder came back to life. She and a few of her teammates huddled around her monitor staring at the XP bootup sequence like never before.
Immediately, she backed up her latest changes to another machine and powered down the hard drive for one last time. No need to make the little guy prove himself any longer. His time had come and he went out a fighter.
Turns out a quick search on Google yields a few similar experiences.
[Originally posted on jixal.com/blog on 8/7/2003]
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Posted by gus at January 6, 2005 09:19 PM
