The comment "Garriott had also been taking a working leave of absence for space exploration around that time." and no one bats an eyelash. A leave of absence for "space exploration"!! How awesome is that? I need to get me one of those.

In addition to freezing drives, I've also heard of putting them in a regular oven at a very low temperature, like 150F or so, to achieve the same effect. I have performed both methods (many moons ago) to try and get drives to spin up. Freezing has worked twice, and warming once for me as far as getting them to simply spin up. I don't think I was actually able to recover much data from either, but then again, like s13g3 mentioned, it wasn't worth the $ to go any further.