[davesmylie]

Never seen this done to a whole laptop, but it wasn't an uncommon last ditch method for pulling files off a dying HDD back in the days of spinning platters.

Preferably in a zip lock vacuum bag and left over night.

This is a 17 year old article, but I'm a little skeptical that 10 minutes in the fridge whilst still in the laptop would have made much difference. Probably the forced reboot did just as much.

On the other end of the heat spectrum, there's baking a motherboard to reflow the solder: https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/6dygu...

[vidarh]

There was also the opposite direction: Putting a drive that's locked up in an oven on low heat to unstick the drive-head.... I knew someone who had to do that ~30 years ago after a long-running server had a power failure and the head had stuck to the platter as it cooled.

This was back when opening the drive itself up to figure out what was wrong was still reasonably unlikely to make things worse (I know that first hand from having "kickstarted" my own drive every morning for months while saving up for a new one by opening it up and nudging the platter)

[CableNinja]

Ive recovered a few drives through the freezer trick. It took a lot though. Freezer for an hour, use until lock, freezer for two hours, then rinse and repeat until data recovered completely. Doesnt have to be overnight, just long enough to get the metal to contract, and theres a point where that change no longer happens and keeping it in the freezer is only wasting time.

On the topic of reflowing in your home oven.. **DONT**!!!!! Thats how you get metal poisoning or other non fun diseases. If you plan on reflowing, use an oven that can go to the scrap yard after, or that will be dedicated solely to reflow. Reflowing can cause vaporization of metals in the solder and the chemicals from flux, etc, and thats just not fun to eat.

[seabass-labrax]

You're absolutely right about the health risks. Additionally, a small oven can be bought online for under $/£/€50 in most countries, and there are many guides online about modifying these to have precise temperature control for delicate soldering jobs. These modifications use inexpensive (usually <€1 each) thermocouples, along with digitally controlled relays or MOSFETs to do pulse-width modulation.

[cl3misch]

I have also tried the Laptop baking many years ago with an ancient Dell Laptop which was known for its buggy internal Nvidia GPU.

However, I have learned in the meantime that lead-free solder requires temperatures much higher than achieved by baking PCBs in a literal kitchen oven.

Is there an explanation why this method is nevertheless so popular (maybe even successfull)?

[KronisLV]

I remember getting my 9800 GT GPU to work a bit longer this way.

I was playing Mount & Blade back then, but noticed that the polygons would glitch out (e.g. vertices in random locations instead of where they should have been, like stretched out 3D models), shortly after which there would be screen artifacts (random colored pixels) and it would all freeze. After that, the PC would fail to boot.

I took the GPU out, propped it up on some tin foil balls, put it into the oven on over 210 C for a while and after that it would start working again. Seems like something was wrong with the card though, because eventually the temperatures would get to 90-100 C and it would crash, but until that point I put it in the oven like 3-4 times and it seemed to work for a little bit every single time.

After that I replaced it with a GTX 650, which still runs to this day in a now friend's computer.

[get-logname]

I can confirm that this method resurected my GTX 970, but only worked for a couple of months more.

[perakojotgenije]

I was luckier, this method also resurrected my GTX 970 and it worked for two more years. It was still working when I sold it.

[speedgoose]

And this is why I don’t like to buy used hardware.

[lstodd]

So that you get to bake it yourself?

[alx_the_new_guy]

https://youtu.be/I0UMG3iVYZI?si=JztMr1sIkBzppkmn

The PS3 issue described in the video was more specific to it, but similar in it's nature.

TLDR from my very imperfect memory: The whole board-solder-chip sandwich expands at different rates due to heat, so internal stress and cracks develop in solder joints, which makes them fail. Baking PCB in an oven does something like making the crack close a bit, so that the solder joint works again.

Problem is, neither the crack, nor the internal stress that has been built up is gone, so the solution actually doesn't last.

[simmo9000]

10 mins does sound a little quick?

I can say from experiencing, 20 mins in the freezer for a bare 3.5 or 2.5 HDD would give about 5 mins of "quick, find important stuff" time...

>_last ditch method for pulling files off a dying HDD_ Before pulling it apart and and putting the platters in an identical donor drive. (Dam IBM DEATHSTAR drives back in the day!)

[samplatt]

>I can say from experiencing, 20 mins in the freezer for a bare 3.5 or 2.5 HDD would give about 5 mins of "quick, find important stuff" time...

Well that's just pulled up a few traumas I'd forgot I'd buried. Gawd, that repeated "race against time" of that 5 minutes when it's working. Knowing that every time you do the freezer/recover cycle, it's closer to straight-up never working again.

[nanidin]

One of the fixes for the red ring of death on Xbox 360 was to wrap it in a towel so it would get hot enough to reflow bad solder joints.

[tiffanyg]

As to the fridge point, fridge vs. room temp probably wouldn't make much difference in what I glean of the scenario from a quick glance. It'd help a bit - would cool things a bit faster,* but, eh ... I wouldn't expect that to necessarily be a KEY element.

That written, temperature may still have been quite important (i.e., reboot alone wouldn't help). Particularly with a device containing something like spinning platters (as well as potentially extra heat generation associated with certain failure modes), and the additional factor of laptop heat load trade-offs, ... simply having the laptop off for some minutes might have been essential. In fact, the writer notes that transfer stopped during the first attempt to retrieve the data (after 10 minutes in fridge), hence a second round of 20 minutes was carried out after which the remaining data was retrieved.

The fact that that second pause was 20 minutes AND was carried out in a fridge may have had little to no role in success the second time. To me, that's something like a 50-50 odds event ... particularly with this kind of infrequent (for an individual, hopefully) 'high-terror' n=1 event / 'data'.** It may have primarily been the difference between having transferred other files prior to transferring that (last? not checking that detail) file vs. not.

* Newton said proportional to temperature difference, but that's a rather rough guide in general for this sort of scenario - even with just basic details missing here

** I.e., where most people aren't too interested in carrying out any kind of more detailed post-mortem ... most are much more interested in leaving the terror part behind.

Edit: OTOH, one should not discount the power of belief out-of-hand - i.e., 'externum-placebo' or something to that effect, if you please (my verbum fabulists will know). As a certain purveyor of cheap movie-branded trinkets once said in response to the soft and breathless exclamation of "I don't believe it!": "That ... is why you fail."

(Though I may be mixing up my little Gs from movies ...)

In any case, the fridge may have had more of an effect than my crudely rational analysis above suggests. {In any case}^2, this entirely unnecessary but necessary addendum will conclude with - ha ha, but, also, serious.

[alex_lav]

When I was ~11ish I found my desktop was overheating quite regularly. The solution I came up with on my $0 dollar budget was to pop the side of the case off and point a box fan into it. Worked like a charm…for a while.

[low_tech_love]

I did this a lot as a kid, up to the point where I just didn’t care about having a case anymore. I completely removed the whole thing and put it on top of a rubber plate, and covered it after use with an old horizontal metal case from a 486 or something. I loved how confused my mother and then later my girlfriend would look when they saw me working/gaming in that total barebones setup. To be honest I have very fond memories of it and would definitely do it again if I didn’t have two small kids!

[dotnet00]

My current desktop setup uses a mining rig frame and tends to get the same confused looks from people.

I have it setup that way because there are no motherboard options for my CPU which allow for sufficient spacing between two triple slot GPUs to provide adequate airflow.

[srean]

Yup. I tried this on a whim on a self assembled AMD K6 and it worked. Without that 'fix', compiling the Linux kernel would fail. Compiling the kernel and making GNU Chess play itself at highest levels were my standard stress tests.

This box wasnt completely self assembled in the sense the CPU was already mounted on the motherboard. Redoing the heat sink with thermal paste fixed the problem, mostly.

[darkwater]

Ahahah did the same with an AMD Athlon that was overheating and hanging a lot at my first job in a very scrappy company (but I was 20!)

[mhandley]

I did that baking-the-motherboard last-resort trick on a Mac Mini three years ago. https://twitter.com/MarkJHandley/status/1245730555846635520

Reallyt didn't think it would work. And when it acctually did, I was sure it would only be a temporary solution. Much to my surprise, it's still going strong today (mostly used as an Octoprint server for my 3d printer.)

[extraduder_ire]

I'm sure there's other nasty substances not covered by it, but I'm glad RoHS2 exists for things like this.

Otherwise you would have really had to get a dedicated oven to do that reflowing. Or lead all over your oven.

[doubled112]

Reminds me of a time that a friend of a friend had me attempt to reflow an old laptop with a $20 heat gun. HP DV6000 or a 9000, if anybody remembers those failure rates. He had two.

I'd worked in a warranty depot and had some experience with the tear down by then.

The reflow didn't work for us, but we did manage to make one of the two functional again.

[kwertzzz]

I once had an issue with my LG5 phone who entered in a boot-loop (also a common issue with LG4). I don't have a head gun, so I put it in the mainboard of the cell phone in oven for maybe 10 min at 150°C to reflow the soldering. At least I could reboot the cell phone and copy the important files. But after about an hour, it enter again the in boot loop and was broken for good.

[opan]

I normally solder at 300C-350C, I can't imagine under 200 reflowing the solder, especially without contact. I have a cheap hot air rework station that I run at 400C-450C (or so it claims) and it is still quite difficult to get anything molten with it (except nearby plastic that I forgot to cover in kapton). Maybe the closed space has some advantages that make up for the lower temp.