Freezing, never heard of that, but there are some problems I can see it might temporarily remedy. Bugaboo could be the condensation building up on the external circuit board while it's running.
Something else - if you put it in another computer as a slave on the primary controller there may be a slave jumper on the drive that you need to set. Also, depending on the second computer you might need to go into it's setup and allow it to autodetect the drive.
This is a first for me. Never saw such a thing! I don’t think it was 2 hours between Avast reporting the virus and the drive dying.
Re: freezing. I’m not going to try it but it works. First you put it in an ant-static bag and then a ziploc, freeze it for 72 hrs, and when you take the drive out, work it ASAP.
Someone upthread said it worked on the same drive twice.
I’m too saturated to try anything more at the moment so I’m trying to convince myself that what is lost can be lived without. I was going to replace the old Dell after the start of the new year, anyway, and had copied a lot of the files...