A Lenovo Yoga 6 dropped and broken. It worked briefly, then stopped, and the client found it would run for around forty seconds after being cooled in a fridge. The M.2 SSD was recovered by removing the memory directly from the board.
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The client's description was unusually diagnostic. The laptop worked a couple of times after the fall, then stopped. It heated up very quickly and cut out. Cooling it in a fridge bought around forty seconds of operation before it stopped again.
That behaviour describes a thermal fault precisely. A component damaged by the impact was drawing excessive current and heating rapidly, and the machine was protecting itself by shutting down. Cooling delayed the threshold being reached; it did not fix anything.
The fridge is not a technique. It is a diagnostic accident. Cooling a machine with a shorting component briefly extends the time before thermal shutdown, and it also introduces condensation onto a board that is already damaged. It should not be repeated.
The storage was an M.2 SSD. With the board unable to remain powered for more than seconds at a time, no conventional imaging route was viable — imaging requires sustained, stable operation, and this machine could not provide it.
The flash memory itself was undamaged. The fault was in the board around it, which meant reaching the NAND directly rather than through the failing electronics.
Full recovery of the data. The flash was in good condition throughout — the entire fault lay in the board it was mounted on.
Chip-off work is slower than conventional imaging because the controller's arrangement of the data has to be reversed before anything is readable. Raw NAND without that step is noise. It is, however, the route that works when the electronics cannot be kept alive.
A machine cutting out quickly and repeatedly is protecting itself from a component drawing current it should not. Continued attempts spread the damage.
Refrigeration buys seconds and introduces moisture. It is not a recovery technique and it can convert an electrical fault into a corroded one.
Where a board cannot be kept powered, reading the memory directly bypasses it entirely. The flash is frequently in perfect condition.