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.

That 20 minutes may have had little to no role in success the second time. 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'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.

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!)

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.

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)?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

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.)

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