lol xbox towel reflow

What about freezing dead hard drives so you can get data off of them? You get about 10 or 15 minutes tops between freezer trips so you have to be quick.

That trick has made me so much cash…

Well I would think electronics can get wet as long as you do not turn them on till they are 100% dry?

I had to deal with an upside-down Playstation too. I think it was actually a design flaw in the first generation, the heating vents were at the bottom so it was very easy to put it on a surface (like carpet) which kept those vents from doing their job.

Dropped faulty Amiga 500 from about 2 ft to reseat ics. Used to save me taking the thing apart.

I have several classic Gameboys which I use to write music and they tend to lose columns of pixels (lots of columns) so I applied lots of heat with a soldering iron to the ribbon connecting the vertical part of the matrix with the glass for about ten minutes and amazingly, no more dead pixels at all!

the freezer trick saved me a few hard drives as well.

on my old PC, the hard drive needle would stick on occasion, and by lifting the front end up about 2 inches and dropping it, it would mysteriously work.

I’ve used similar methods to repair ball grid arrays on xbox 360s and the newer dlp, lcd, and plasma television. Though I usually place the chip I want to reset facing up. Then after a minute of heat I put a small weight on the chip. After another minute remove the heat, but leave the weight. Only thing you have to worry about is accidentally shifting the chip while the solder is hot.

I’ve had mouse infested projection televisions that I had to use a mild pressure wash on before they could be repaired.

Electronics and water get along fine. So long as the water and contaminants are gone before electricity shows up. Also have to remember that some capacitors keep a charge and could short out when water is applied.

@rasz
For surface mount parts as long as they are not heavy and the board isn’t bumped the solder will hold the part like glue.

@rasz
also, frequently smd element on the bottom side are glued to the board, as well as soldered.

I’m sure that everyone remembers the HP monitors with a loose solder connection, where the fix described in the manual was ‘percussive maintenance’. Then there’s the Creative Zen’s HDD sticktion problems, fixed with a good hard whack to the side of the player.

The Xbox 360 towel trick totally works. I got RROD a few years ago so I tried the towel repair because of a video I saw on Youtube, then managed to get in about 45 minutes of Guitar Hero 2 before it died again.

i don’t know if this is considered crazy, but a few cordless phones i had lost response on the keypad, and cleaning the oil of the contacts with some alcohol made them work again. and there is also the rubber eraser trick where you clean the pc card contacts and memory module contacts with it, and they are magically working again.

The pencil eraser thing got me a fluke multimeter for nothing (someone gave it to me cause it didn’t work after it’d been dropped in a puddle)

oO

Seen and played with one ps1 that worked only upside down. Top-side up, it just didnt detect the disc..

i had a computer that would only turn on if the case was on it’s side. once it was on, i could put it back upright, but next time i had to powercycle, over it had to go. in the end i just kept it sideways. worked for 5 years or so before it finally gave up the ghost.

I have had several instances requiring freezing of harddrives. works like a charm.

I still have my PS1 that requires it to be upside down to work, if it works.

I used to work at a TV repair shop, and the vast majority of what we fixed were mitsubishi electric’s V26 chassis DLPs (the WD**525, WD**625, and WD**825 models) which were almost entirely capacitor replacement jobs. what we’d often see is several capacitors in series or parallel in the power supplies from one of the other (less professional) shops not having the right parts and just slapping something together to get the tv to “work” needless to say, it didn’t stick too well. some of them were even just taped to the pads with some electrical tape, too.

we’ve come across the xbox 360 fixes a few times, and they’re kinda hit and miss.

there’ve been a few instances where I’ve had to reflow solder in my oven before, on a thinkpad A30, I’ve fixed the gpu with that, and I’ve also used a mechanical pencil to repair a couple micro fractures in the same laptop’s mainboard.

@nihilocat Yeah, unfortunately heat dissipation and laser decay were common for its later generations too.

You can use a dollar bill to clean contacts on pci cards and what not

Popped my camera in the oven, because it was wet.

Deionized water is the only way to clean electronics.

When in doubt – duck it!

@ Gage

I had the same experience with the towel trick, 30 minutes upside down in a towel and it would work for an hour or so. I kept doing that for a while but eventually just tried the wedge-under-the-ram-chips trick which kept it going for about 6 months before it got hit with the banhammer.

The towel method for a xbox is probably the worst way of doing. Whoever thought of the idea, never thought of thermal runaway. In most cases, the bga ic needs to be reflowed, and even though you might reflow it with the towel method, the thermal damage could have destroyed other parts of the board even though the bga has been reflowed. lol

Hah, I have never owned a Playstation that didn’t need to be upside down.

My first liked to run on the left side at 10-30° from vertical.

It is the laser sled rails made from plastic that wear out and cause misalignment of the laser.

RE wet electronics: try a putting them bowl of dry rice, the rice will absorb the moisture.

My sister has a laptop which was random rebooting.
After a full hour inspecting the motherboard circuitry, I found a detached SMD resistor.
I simply soldered it again into place.

I doubt putting the motherboard inside the oven would work because the SMD resistor was actually a little out of its place.

lulz at all you thinking that a towel will reflow the solder on a 360

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solder

Back in the day, we had an electronics lab full of 286s with hard drives that would stick on boot up. A 1″ hole in the side of the case allowed a well timed whack to the HD with a nut driver. This kept us going for over a year until the school could replace the machines.

Also, I once had to dive for an iPod nano 3rd gen in a lake, it was about 15 feet down. After 20 minutes of looking, I find it, open it up, dry it out with a hair dryer and sock, waited a day, plugged it in, and it worked fine.

circuit boards are often rinsed with water during manufacturing to remove flux residues. i have cleaned several motherboards with the garden hose followed by a rinse in distilled water and a few days in a warm place to dry off. i suspect the reason half the motherboards don’t make it through the dishwasher is that they were broken in some way that washing couldn’t fix. the dishwasher is also pretty aggressive.

btw nick show that 360 whos the boss!!! its amazing how often electronics responds to physical violence. i used to regularly smack computers that didn’t work. most even seem to respond to verbal threats lol

I know a guy who repairs iBooks by putting flaming gas on it (on the GPU actually) and people pay for it! XD

@christopher

I like to call it percussive maintenance.

Sony DSC-series digital cameras are reknowned for the “E61-turn power off and on again” error, which is usually down to the lens cover gears getting crunged up. They are tiny, plastic, and driven by a tiny motor producing bugger all torque – the slightest bit of dust in the gearing causes them to jam.

A common fix for this is “turn it off, slap the hell out of the camera, then turn it on again”.

This works, but is liable to bugger up the focus and zoom motors – a better solution is to take the front case off, remove the lens cover assembly entirely, short the “cover open” sensor, and put it all back together. The lens cover can be replaced by gluing part of a 35mm film canister to the front of the camera, and using the canister lid to seal the lens assembly when the camera’s not in use.

I bought 2 busted DSC-600s for 15€ total including shipping from fleabay, fixed them this way, and use them as “disposable” cameras for snowboarding, rockclimbing and other “hazardous” activities. I had one of them taped onto the top of my ice hockey helmet for a match once…

The freezer trick on hard drives works longer if you wrap the hard drive in a “cold sleeve” for medical uses. It’s basically a cold gel pack you freeze.

I can get 30 minutes that way.

I had a laptop that you had to spin when you powered it up to get the drive to spin up. I also had to open it every 6 months to put a drop of silicone oil on the center of the HDD spindle shaft.

20 meg laptop hard drives were not only rare then but insane priced Plus I refusedto go back to using the 2 inch” special floppys it had.

Zenith minisports were cool as hell, but man they were a PITA in special parts. I was lucky and sent a Minisport HD with the Massive 20 meg hard drive accidentially instead of the Minisport I bought. I kept quiet :->

I fixed an old Creative Zen mp3 player with a stuck hard drive and a loose audio jack. I disassembled the whole thing, removed the hard drive, and slammed it as hard as I could against a desk. BAM! Fixed. As for the audio jack, I folded a thick square of paper up and propped it between the interior of the jack and some metal casing on the inside. When the battery stopped holding a charge, I gave up on the piece of garbage and got a SanDisk Sansa.

I put my xbox360 in the oven after applying pennies to the motherboard to fix the shoddy factory heat sinks. I to this day haven’t seen a red ring.

I have also used rice on phones that have been submerged in water. I’ve had pretty good success with that. As long as voltage was not applied to the phone while it was wet, it seems to do well.

Hmmm. An nVidia casserole. Interesting. That’s even better than fixing a speaker with rubber cement.

I’m surprised the caps didn’t pop or the power connector didn’t melt… [for the vid card that this article is about]

I know there’s so many posts already that nobody will get a chance to read this. I had to test a rs232 port on a computer in the field, so to create a loop back connection, I bent up a small paperclip and cut two small bits off an ink pen’s ink tube and used those to couple the paperclip to the serial pins.

also, I had a crt that would show screwy colors randomly, but a good punch to the glass sorted everything out.

I worked at an electronic salvage yard, I used to rob really dead motherboards of their capacitors and verify they were still good with a cap tester and fix other boards that just needed new caps on the voltage regulation circuit etc… (around processor.) Worked like a charm 90% of the time. (after a 24 hour burn in they still functioned correctly.)

A few years ago I had a motherboard that would only work when not screwed into a case. This motherboard was my best mb at the time, so it just sat on a wooden block and would do it’s thing.

I had a laptop that had a crappy video to video card interface and would periodically loosen the connector ribbon. So I would take it apart (the whole thing had to come apart), pull out the connector ribbon, and then reconnect it.

I have a desktop that I currently run, that for some reason will only work with a CDROM connected to the first IDE port as a master. Otherwise none of the other hard drives are recognized.

Towel trick for the 360 is worthless. You are doing more damage than good. You only want to heat the parts that need repair (usually CPU/GPU). The towel trick heats EVERYTHING and can severely damage other unintended parts. The best solution is to take the thing apart and heat the CPU/GPU only by removing the fan and letting it overheat (just until the overheat error shows up). As long as you replaced the xclamps and have even pressure on the dies, 9 times out of 10 it worked. I had a box that worked for over two years before it completely went bad on me using that method.

I worked for a small startup doing touchup&clip and QC eons ago, and until their order for dedicated board washing machines came in, we had a row of half a dozen dishwashers.Bye-bye mister flux and all that sickening pink masking, no problem.

@Skitchin: haha that reminds me of the time I hit a CRT monitor so hard it needed to run its degaussing function to get the colours back to normal!

When I got my first Amiga, a 1500, I needed a 25-way D connection cable for an external SCSI drive, couldn’t afford the extorionate price of a shop-bought cable so I found out the pinout of SCSI 50-way connectors and proceeded to make my own by stripping the necessary 25 individual wires of a SCSI 50-way ribbon cable and soldering them to a 25-way D plug. Worked like a charm first time and lasted for many years.

The lithium-polymer battery in my Archos AV500 wouldn’t hold *any* charge, so recently I took one of the lithium-polymer batteries from my iRiver H140 spares (once bought several dead ones to make a few good ones) and swapped the battery over, soldered just the battery into the dead batterys charge control circuit. It lives again! and saved me a pile of money :)
Weirdly one of the faulty iRiver H140 motherboards would only work when it was upside, turn it over or shake it and the thing would freeze (music stopped, LCD screen not changing) until it was reset – never did figure out how to fix that despite many attempts.

BTW, keep the replies flooding in, I’m thoroughly enjoying reading everone’s problem solving anecdotes :)

forgot to mention i also reflown the audio jack putting the board in the oven to repair it, as the guy in the arcticle did.

Acetone is most usefull to drive moisture and water away form pcb. It is safe for pcb and all SMD components, but be careful, it will fog clear plastics, and will eat many other. Just spill some on to the pcb, brush away with toothbrush, repeat several times, and then shake excess acetone away. Acetone evaporates easy, and an hair-dryer can make pcb workable in 30 minutes. Don’t overheat pcb, if you can touch it with the fingers and keep your fingers on it it is hot enough.

I have been using an hair-dryer to heat PC pcbs enough to be able to unsolder leaked capacitors with wimpy 20W soldering iron. I have replaced leaked capacitors on more than 30 PC main boards with 100% sucess.

@modembug
You can test capacitors without expensive cap tester. Just measure the leakage current at voltage close to rated. An variable voltage power supply, an resistor and an voltmeter is all you need. My PC uses an motherboard more than 8 years old with fifth set of capacitors around CPU.

I had a hard drive that stopped spinning up. I turned it on its side, and it ran like that just fine for a couple weeks, enough time to copy everything off. Then it made a horrible noise and died.

My Acer aspire has a loose screw securing the power switch. The switch itself is amazingly convenient as a key chain, and oddly that’s what I use it for when it’s not in the computer.

I had the opposite problem: Too good of a soldering job. My wife’s Dell laptop, like most 3-5 year old laptops, had a flaky power connector. Unfortunately, the only soldering iron I could find to replace it with was a decade-old radioshack cheapie. It couldn’t get up enough heat to de-solder the power connector because of its (relatively) thick housing acting as a heat sink.

Eventually I had to resort to play “D.” As in a “Dremel” with a “diamond-tipped cutting blade.” Even then the traces in the board where too thick for four of the pins, and they too had to be dremeled out with a very narrow bore. I have to say the whole idea of taking a dremel to a motherboard didn’t sit well with me at first, but it did actually work, and power cords once again fit snug and secure.