My PS3 died this past weekend after I got back from working on the other side of the country. Of course it happened the day before I got back home...
Someone was playing Batman AA and it just turns off. I always had some locking up issues when using playing SSF2HDR but I always attributed it to the game's bad interface programming. The week before I left for work I had a really strange crash where I tried starting a new online game in SSF2HDR and upon communication with PSN the entire PS3 just locked up. I hard rebooted it and it asked me to submit an error report, which I did.
So yesterday I opened the thing up (which turned out to be surprisingly easy) and used this tutorial:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_Ic1_TY-GU
Warning: I completely destroyed the blue hard drive screw and needed to buy an extractor bit to get it out. Be careful. I saw a dual mode heat gun (700/1000 degrees) for $15 at Home Depot but ended up getting the digital version with more heat settings for $38.
Be careful not to hit the USB ports when performing the fix as I crashed into them on the cool down procedure and I thought it was over. Luckily it still worked and I was able to transfer my data and saves to my new 250GB slim. Took about 1.5 hours for 60GB of data.
For now I'm just leaving my BC 80GB phat PS3 unscrewed and ready to heat up again for the eventual subsequent failures. I replaced the thermal paste with some Arctic Silver 3 so hopefully it goes for a little bit longer. The original thermal paste was overdone, sloppy and had chunks oozing out the edges. It was so bad that if your warranty was up I would recommend to replace the thermal paste immediately if you are good with stuff like that.
Thank goodness for the system transfer utility in the last firmware update. Without that I would have lost all progress in my copy protected Rock Band 2 save with over 300 DLC. Not sure if I would have played it ever again.