I once had a hard drive fail this way. It was a 60GB SATA disk from around 2006. I powered down the machine to drop in a couple of new disks and gave the machin

I once had a hard drive fail this way. It was a 60GB SATA disk from around 2006. I powered down the machine to drop in a couple of new disks and gave the machine a much needed dusting. When it restarted it had the click of death. The freezer trick worked long enough for me to grab the few kb of data I really needed from that disk. I wrote about it here: https://miscdotgeek.com/adventures-in-hard-drives/ https://miscdotgeek.com/adventures-in-hard-drives/