I’m not sure if this counts because it wasn’t intentional on my part, but… When I was a kid, my mom had a digital camera. The lense on it would extend when it was powered on, and then retract when it was powered off.
At some point the lense got stuck, which caused the camera to not turn on properly and made it useless so she ended up getting a new one. I had gone to take the old/broken one to mess around with it and accidentally dropped it.
Apparently the angle that it fell at was just enough to “lodge” the lense back into place yet the fall wasn’t high enough to cause it to shatter or break. It worked perfectly after that, and while my parents were a bit upset they needlessly bought a new camera, they ended up letting me keep the old one.
(Later on I figured that was their way of justifying not returning the new camera that probably had nice new features or something)
I also vaguely remembering them saying something along the lines of “That’s probably the only time in your life dropping a piece of equipment will actually fix it and was just luck - don’t go trying that on other things randomly”.
A long, long time ago, at a helpdesk far, far away I “revived” a couple hard drives with a short drop. Never actually fixed them, but it’s gotten a few to spin just long enough to retrieve some important emails or documents.
I wouldn’t recommend it, but sometimes you just gotta persuade stuff…
I’m not sure if this counts because it wasn’t intentional on my part, but… When I was a kid, my mom had a digital camera. The lense on it would extend when it was powered on, and then retract when it was powered off.
At some point the lense got stuck, which caused the camera to not turn on properly and made it useless so she ended up getting a new one. I had gone to take the old/broken one to mess around with it and accidentally dropped it.
Apparently the angle that it fell at was just enough to “lodge” the lense back into place yet the fall wasn’t high enough to cause it to shatter or break. It worked perfectly after that, and while my parents were a bit upset they needlessly bought a new camera, they ended up letting me keep the old one.
(Later on I figured that was their way of justifying not returning the new camera that probably had nice new features or something)
I also vaguely remembering them saying something along the lines of “That’s probably the only time in your life dropping a piece of equipment will actually fix it and was just luck - don’t go trying that on other things randomly”.
A long, long time ago, at a helpdesk far, far away I “revived” a couple hard drives with a short drop. Never actually fixed them, but it’s gotten a few to spin just long enough to retrieve some important emails or documents.
I wouldn’t recommend it, but sometimes you just gotta persuade stuff…