hard disk fixed with frozen peas

Holy crap! The freezer trick worked^†! I left the dead hard disk in the freezer overnight. ... Tonight I rushed it out in a chilled pyrex dish in the company of various frozen vegetables. With power supplied, the disk just clicked twice like before. I gave it a whack and it came to life, begrudgingly, and with lots of bad scraping and grinding noises. It lived for just seven minutes, but that was enough time to copy it! (The whole disk image is only 1.4 GB!)

Thanks to Linux for making this easy:

dd if=/dev/sdb1 of=./bbs	Copy entire disk partition to a file
mount -o loop ./bbs /media/loop	Mount that file as a filesystem

Above is a rendition (via ansi2png) of the one file I wanted from that disk: the welcome screen to the BBS I ran in junior high and high school, and, after a three-year intermission, for a brief time in college. It was called the Digital Forest (or even "Digital Forest Information System"!). The ANSI graphic was created by Lord Jazz (I never knew him by any other name) who shortly thereafter became a member of ACiD (which is apparently still around).

Maybe for hilarity purposes I'll try to boot this disk image. It's OS/2!

^†It's possible the freezer had nothing to do with it; when I powered the disk up earlier and got only the clicks, I didn't try hitting it or anything else.