I once had an old IBM-PC that the previous owner had upgraded with a 20MB hard drive. They said after a while it just stopped booting, which is why they gave it to me.
I found that if I manipulated the axle of the read-write-head arm where it came out through the bottom of the drive, it would "unstick" the head from the surface of the disk, and the thing would boot! I imagine there was some kind of lubricant in there that would congeal when the machine was off for a certain amount of time.
So I left the drive slot cover off, and "fingering" the drive would get it to start reliably for a number of years after that.
Huh this is really good to know, I have a drive where the head seems to "stick" to the drive (or something)... I wonder if that's a potential common solution, just jostle it around and/or lubricate it to free it up a bit??
It's called stiction. On old stepper-motor-based drives this would commonly happen if the heads weren't parked before powering off. I don't recommend directly manipulating the actuator as you can literally shear the heads off the actuator arm with too much force, but a bit of oblique shock to the side of the drive will usually unstick them with less risk of damage.
I got a cheap used original PS4 and it wouldn't power up unless you put pressure on the mainboard, right around the PSU.
I took pieces of wood, and a clamp and applied pressure there and it worked.
The same pressure is applied if you use washers on the heatsink clamp - I did that and it's been running fine for months.
The solder joints on the GPU get brittle under the stress of heat and compressing it restores the connection. Pressure or re-flowing is really just a band-aid, the real fix is to re-ball the GPU but that gets expensive.
Classic. This was a common failure mode for the 360 as well. Used to fix friends 360s that had the red ring of death by tearing them down, tightening the braces underneath the heat sink, and adding an additional case fan.
Never actually had to escalate to reflowing the BGA mount underneath the GPU but recall tutorials of how to do that in a consumer oven.. thank goodness I never tried that one at home.
The real hack with the 360 with that issue was to wrap it in towels and turn it on so it'd cook and reflow itself. Absolutely bonkers that trick worked for anyone at all, let alone for enough people for it to be a "thing".
Tech is already pretty reliable in my experience (At least the cheap stuff that isn't as high power and doesn't thermal cycle as much I guess), but getting rid of solder as a failure mode and making chips swappable would be so cool.
If they could somehow make production grade Z axis tape we could just tape the parts on with a 3d printed frame for position, and anyone could do component level repair without much skill.
And all the chips from dead devices could be reusable, if there was a way to automatically sort them all.
I had that with an old drive that was in a drawer for years. I tried it many times and it wouldn't start. Then I accidentally dropped it (it landed pretty hard, hitting a metal table leg)... After that it worked fine and I was able to copy off all the data.
I've stuck drives in the freezer twice and they worked long enough to recover the data after. Both were small spinning external drives (laptop hdds) that had stopped working completely.
