Maybe these two things are already known by many of you, but they were a revelation to me, so I thought I'd share them:
(1) The refrigerator can help you rescue data from a failing external drive. (2) Sometimes the failure is the enclosure instead of the drive itself.
Some details follow. I began to see some problems with one of the two FW external drives I use for backups and maintenance. It sometimes took two or three power-on/power-off cycles to get it to mount. I foolishly ignored these signs. Then, when at my Dad's, helping him with some maintenance, the drive apparently went totally bad - I was unable to mount its volumes at all.
Sure enough, back home, I was able to mount once and get a screen shot of contents, but then unable to get any more mounts. A friend from work said he'd sometimes had luck rescuing some data by putting the external in the freezer. I tried this and it gave me enough time to copy a few data sets. I was concerned about all the condensation from the freezer, so next time I just put it in the refrigerator for 24 hours. Using this method several times, I eventually copied all my data. I would eventually start getting errors and Finder would freeze. But I'd get enough time, each iteration, to copy some big data sets, the largest being 60 Gig.
That enclosures could go bad was not really a new revelation to me, but I *assumed* in this case that my hard drive was going bad. I ordered a new 500 Gig Seagate from Newegg. I've had great luck over the years with both Seagate and Newegg, so was horrified when the new drive would not mount. It then occurred to me that I ought to at least investigate the possibility that the enclosure was bad. I took the drive to work and tried it in an enclosure there. It came right up. Back home, I tried my "bad" drive in the enclosure borrowed from work and - surprise! - no problems mounting and using the volumes.
I learned a *new* lesson: the fridge can save your data; and re-learned an *old* lesson: never assume.
I've ordered a new enclosure. I don't feel too bad about the unneeded hard drive purchase, since it was about time to move up in capacity. I hope the lessons I learned will be of value to some of you folks.
