Blinking Red light of death - F'ng Hell

**TAZ427** · 06-28-2012

I found my PS3 Bricked yesterday when I got home. Not sure if it was before, during or after the update (not blaming the update.) I just signed up for PS+ a couple weeks back and this would have been my first 'Auto-update of the OS'. Unfortunately I didn't go in and setup my cloud game save backups except on a couple games, but I did have it set to Auto-update game and OS updates overnight.

I took it apart last night and applied some new thermal compound but it do anything for it. I've ripped it back apart and I'm borrowing a heat gun from the lab today and will try the poor mans reflow. If that fails, I may bring the board into work and fire-up our labs rework/reflow station.

I'm just hoping to get the thing to fire up, so I can 1.) Get my disc out of the drive and 2.) hopefully be able to do a backup of my HDD, which I haven't done since I upgraded my HDD a couple years back.

It was a 80GB BC, 4 USB port, Memory Card Reader version. I don't care about the BC on it at this point, or the Memory Card Reader, but I'll miss the 4 USB ports.

Note that the dust level inside was actually pretty decent.

**Monte666** · 06-28-2012

Good luck im dreading the day mine does that

From my Damn phone

**NYFAN75** · 06-30-2012

Sorry to hear that Taz buddy... Mine did this to me last year.. I did the reflow with the heat gun and it worked for a bit but died again a week later... Bought a new system and repaired it one more time so I could do the data transfer and then disable the system so my account could then be transfered... Also what I did the second go around was to leave the top off so it had more air to breathe... So I wish you good luck...

**TAZ427** · 06-30-2012

Thanks, I managed to get it back to life, well mostly back to life with the heat gun. The BT and WiFi isn't working - still see's MAC addresses and I don't think I left anything off, but I'm not to worried about it. When I plugged up the HDD I backed up on before it wasn't recognizing it. Scarred the crap out of me as I thought it was another issue with the PS3. I plugged it into my laptop and it didn't show up there. So I grabbed the HDD case that I back my PC's up on and check it, sure enough it was alive so I swapped out the HDD and used that case and backed everything up last night.

I've got Gamestop's Summer Bundle coming (160GB PS3 w/ Sly Collection and Gran Turismo 5 XL.) It should be here on Monday.

I hope I can do a restore to the 160GB HDD, my backup was 136GB. Not sure how much is already going to be consumed and how much compression may be there. I will be moving my 500GB HDD that's in my 80GB over, but I don't want to do it until I'm confident of being able to do the restore without issue.

After I get the new system up and running, I'll go back in and see if I can figure out what's wrong with the WiFi and BT. I'm guessing that the board under the card reader is where the WiFi and BT antenna's are (at least the PCB looks like it had a built in antenna at the front of it.) If I get that up and going, I'll move it to another TV.

**keefy** · 06-30-2012

Blue tooth and wifi not working is ususally due to forgetting to reconnect the ribbon cable behind the blutooth board.

http://youtu.be/VHgCa3XEPic?t=7m7s

**NYFAN75** · 06-30-2012

Definatley a good idea to put in the 500gb... The new system I get was the 320 move bundle and I am almost out of space on that.. And I am not tech savvy enough to figure out how to back my stuff up on to a computer in order to upgrade my hard drive..

**TAZ427** · 06-30-2012

Originally Posted by keefy

Blue tooth and wifi not working is ususally due to forgetting to reconnect the ribbon cable behind the blutooth board.

http://youtu.be/VHgCa3XEPic?t=7m7s

Thanks Keefy, I figured it might have been a loos cable. I don't recall the first cable that was connected in the video so I suspect that's the one. And that is the board I assumed had the WiFi antenna, that protrusion from the PCB at the front of it is an antenna. I'm sure I'd have figured it out when examining it but it's good to see a video of it so now I don't have to worry about it.

**TAZ427** · 06-30-2012

Originally Posted by NYFAN75

Definatley a good idea to put in the 500gb... The new system I get was the 320 move bundle and I am almost out of space on that.. And I am not tech savvy enough to figure out how to back my stuff up on to a computer in order to upgrade my hard drive..

I'm an Electrical Engineer so this is 2nd nature for me. That said, I was really skeptical regarding the use of a heat gun to reflow this. It went against my nature as an engineer. After I get the new system up and going, I may take the board back out and into work and use our lab's reflow machine to get a good reflow.

I'm guessing what happens is a cracked solder joint between the balls and the pads. If they had a weak solder joint from the beginning then the heating and flexing of the PCB can cause such a crack and that's is what I assume is quickly tested (a BSDL test of the pins at bootup - if it fails such as no ground contact on specific pins and it shuts down to prevent system damage) and then you get the quick flashing red light of death. A poor reflow is going to give moderate contact but eventually will break. A proper reflow could permanently fix this.

I will say while the thermal paste looked to have been non-existent or in a limited area, it was actually pretty good. I could feel the 'greasiness' of it in the area's where it was so thin that it was transparent and it was not powdery on the package and heatsink pads as others have reported. It was only dried out on the edges where it had squeezed out, which is too be expected.

I've dealt with this before with customers using our devices with large ball count (in excess of 1000 balls) on a package and them not following the prescribed reflow sequence/schedule/temps resulting in less than optimal soldering of the balls and then having field failures trying to blame it on our devices. We'd get them back, retest and everything is fine with the devices and after extensive investigations finding out the problem was with their board manufactures not following the proper reflow requirements.

Sorry if I made anyone bored to death on this, but I've seen a lot of hypothesis' on the failure reasoning on a too many threads and most of them I wanted to say that the people didn't know WTF they were talking about and now I feel even more strongly they didn't.

**keefy** · 07-01-2012

Originally Posted by TAZ427

Thanks Keefy, I figured it might have been a loos cable. I don't recall the first cable that was connected in the video so I suspect that's the one. And that is the board I assumed had the WiFi antenna, that protrusion from the PCB at the front of it is an antenna. I'm sure I'd have figured it out when examining it but it's good to see a video of it so now I don't have to worry about it.

The videos he made helped me alot in both dismantling and rebuilding so whenever possible I link people to them.

**NYFAN75** · 07-01-2012

To bad I did not know what you did back when my system died... I would have sent it to you

**TAZ427** · 07-01-2012

Originally Posted by NYFAN75

To bad I did not know what you did back when my system died... I would have sent it to you

I seldom bring it up. I still managed to do something stupid while doing this. I skipped into the middle of the video's and I managed to snap every F'ng tab off the cover. I thought I was prying it out, but it's a slide down then remove. Grrr... not to big of a deal as I can use a couple spots of low strength epoxy to hold it in place (and will break loose w/o breaking the cover.)

Anyway, I went back in based on Keefy's link and found that the first ribbon cable was indeed not re-inserted. That was a quick fix and now I'm back to 100%. I backed up all my unprotected gamesaves to the PSN+ cloud server. Now I'm considering if I shouldn't just buy another HDD and do a PS3 to PS3 transfer.

**NYFAN75** · 07-01-2012

That would probably be your best and easiest solution... It took me roughly 10 hrs transfer all my stuff at the time... I would hate to see what it would be like now

**DreDayDetox** · 07-01-2012

Originally Posted by NYFAN75

The new system I get was the 320 move bundle and I am almost out of space on that..

Pr0n filled HDD, eh?

**NYFAN75** · 07-01-2012

Originally Posted by DreDayDetox

Pr0n filled HDD, eh?

Not quit... but I just have a lot of stuff on there now... PS+ has been good to me

**DreDayDetox** · 07-01-2012

It's cool, I know what you mean by "stuff" LOL

**TDbank24** · 07-02-2012

That sucks. It's good you got it working again though.

I've never had a problem with either my fat or slim PS3. Watch it brick on me for saying that.

**keefy** · 07-02-2012

1 reason why backups take so long to complete is the standard drives in PS3 are slow as heck.

I used my 40GB in my regular computer as a spare boot drive to test new and beta operating systems and it almost took 2 minutes to reboot, login and be useable as in launching firefox, I clicked the icon but nothing happened for another 30 seconds or so.

**johnodd4** · 07-03-2012

Let me tell you my horror story my ps3 fat stopped ejecting disks so i had to purchase a new slim deck and transfer my data so i deleted all of my digital games on purpose and backed up all my saves to a external hard drive along with my music and photo's not using sonys backup utility of course because of drm protection after backing up all of that i decided to do a pan to pan transfer everything was off my fats hard drive no music no photos no games no save data just my account and 5 theme files i wanted transfered over it took 9 hours to transfer by lan lan faster my can

**TAZ427** · 07-03-2012

I decided to see if could make Pier to Pier / Direct Cable as Sony calls it (Ethernet cable between the two PS3s) to the Native 160GB HDD in the Slim. I want to make sure I've got a working copy of it in the Slim before I pull my 500GB HDD out of my Phat and slap it into the Slim and then do my Restore for Backup (as I've read the horror stories of it not working.) Worst case I figure I'd slap the 160GB back in, back it up, and try again until it works.

I had about 8GB too much, so I went in and deleted about 10GB's worth of demo's I had on it that I'll probably never play again. I did the pier to pier transfer. Ignoring Sony's messages trying to get me to disable the account on my Phat first. It transferred in right at 3 hours (the backup was over 5hrs) I'm guessing the bottleneck is actually in their USB port and not the HDD. Note that's pegging out the 100Mbps data rate of the Ethernet interface.

Tonight, I'll move the 500GB HDD to the Slim and do a restore from the Backup. It was late last night when it finished the transfer or else I would have done it then.

After that I'll probably slap the original 80GB HDD back into the phat and get it up and running, but limit it to DL games only in another room of the house. My 10yr old son's already begging me to put it in his room and to get him a TV, LOL.