Voodoo - Freeze Your Hard Drive to Recover Data

While a true story, the following contains what may very well be a bad idea...

I have an external 250 GB hard drive that, as of a few days ago, would not spin up. Upon power up, it would make an short buzzing sound following by, click, click, click, click, click and so on. I tried disconnecting and reconnected it a few dozen times with different cables, different ports, different power supply. No luck.

Finally, I decided to try freezing the drive by letting it sit on top of a large gel ice pack for 15 minutes. While still sitting on the ice pack, I powered it and it spun up on the first try! I then immediately began copying everything off the drive. The drive ran for about 3 hours while the ice pack slowly melted. Then it was back to click, click, click...

I got the idea from here:

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=2006110111270170