After trying it in a couple of different computers I accidentally dropped the drive and it hit a metal table leg.
After dropping it, the HDD started up and worked fine, and I could copy the contents off.
Maybe the liquid nitrogen worked the same way (thermal shock in place of mechanical shock).
This was an infamous fix when your Atari ST's chips were working their way out of their sockets back in the 1980's.
http://info-coach.fr/atari/documents/_myfaq/quickfaq-2.8a/st...
The solution is to use your pinky finger on the stepper motor spindle and twist. As long as you felt the stepper move from home, you’re good, you’re not stuck anymore.
I had a Seagate I had to “twist” start every time it powered up, not often as it ran 24/7. You can do it with the drive in the machine as long as you can reach the stepper.
I’m writing this not so much for you but for the archivists thousands of years from now. Hope you get those Seagates started folks! ;)
By freezing the drive, the metal would shrink just enough to unstick the head. Of course the location where the head crash had happened would be corrupt, but the rest of the data would be fine (mostly).
I spent 40 minutes copying that drive, got every bit back.
Boss asks, “What are you doing?”
“I’m milking the data out of this drive!” ;)
The IT Crowd always impressed me with their set design. I was working as "IT" at the time, and our office was nearly identical to the one in Season 1. We had O'Reilly stickers everywhere. There were an infinite number of desk toys all over the place. We spent 99% of our day screwing around. It just felt so authentic to me at the time, and still does to this day. (Some of that screwing around was legit office stuff, though. Our air conditioner's drainage pipe was blocked, so we rigged up a fish tank pump to pump the water out of it into a giant bucket. We'd then dump that in one of the many floor drains that our office had, because of course our building's hallway had floor drains every 3 feet. The other 1% of the day was screwing around under the guise of helping people. We were the computer support team for the Physics department at the University of Chicago. People who had recently won the Nobel prize would come to us with things like "my hard drive died", and we would just put it in a plastic bag, immerse it in liquid nitrogen, and copy off their files. Worked every single time. Did we ever try copying the files before freezing the thing? Absolutely not. We weren't the scientists, we were a bunch of random idiots trying to help, and we had an unlimited supply of liquid nitrogen in the building.)