I'm buying a broken PS3 from my friend, who said he gave it to gamestop once to fix. They said his hard drive was fried and fixed it. Strange thing is, his symptoms occur while playing games, which leads me to believe, since its happening again, that they just cleaned the laser off with some alcohol and overcharged him. Has anyone heard of this?

its probably most likely the gpu or cpu just like the 360 with it having bad connections or flexing from the heating and cooling over time i have a ps3 that did this then got the ylod and i reflowed it with a heatgun and applied arctic silver 5 on the chips and it worked for me and it has been for over a year now so maybe you can try this

just format the damn hdd.

i have seen them hang up b/c of a bad sector or garbage on the hdd. dvd drives either work or don't work, have yet to see one in between. and they don't typically "pre ylod"