I had a laptop hard drive suffer a head crash on the lower platter, and it was able to seek past it. Further, the freezer trick seemed to work a little, but it

I had a laptop hard drive suffer a head crash on the lower platter, and it was able to seek past it. Further, the freezer trick seemed to work a little, but it may have been simply letting the drive rest for a while. I do know that I've never seen it take 12 full hours to reach temperature equilibrium in a hard drive. 3 or 4 usually does the trick just fine. I eventually got most of my important data off. This was before external hard drives were commonplace and frequent backups of laptops made much sense, though.