hardware tricks

Earlier this year, I posted a short story and video of my attempt at – and success – repairing a Gateway notebook that was suffering a Code 43 GPU error. The “fix” seemed almost too good to be true: dismantle the notebook and blast the GPU with a hairdryer for a couple minutes in order to reflow the solder. At the time, I also mentioned that I had a couple hard drives that I was going to try repairing in order to recover some pictures and data for a friend. Six months later, apparently a few people still want to know what happened, so this is my story. Sadly, things didn’t go so well this time, but let me go through the full sequence...