Chosen Solution
Hello all~ I been repairing 3DS’s on ebay for a while and figured I’d venture into other consoles. When I opened this one up, the hdd sata connection on the motherboard was pulled off the board, the connector was destroyed but there was no visible damage to the board. I took it to bits and put on new thermal paste - the old stuff was rather stuck on. It didn’t want to come off with just the 99% iso. I’m not too familiar with xbox consoles so I don’t know if they use thicker thermal paste, but I know it was much harder to get off then the stuff I use on my computer and other equipment. I guess it’s also possible the previous owner tried the hair dryer gimmick and turned it into a paperweight! Haha. After getting it back together, I tried booting it with the original hdd by external usb to no avail. I do have a 7 pin sata connector coming in the mail soon so I can give that a try. I expected something to happen even without the hdd though, nothing on the screen at all. So it’s probably toast, but figured maybe here could provide some insight. I haven’t tested for shorts or done any tests with the multimeter yet, that’ll be the next thing I check out. Thanks for looking and hope everyone is having a swell weekend. Cheers, Turky
@turkylobster … i use standard artic silver paste. never fails. the system wont boot off external drives. replace the connector on the mother board and go from there. start looking for any shorts. if none found, i would look at the hdmi port and retimer ic chip. this is a lot of the reason there is no signal on these devices. if you find a short, i would just start looking to trace to the apu. typically if shorted, it will trace back there. if so, part it out.
