I Just Felt Like Sharing My PS3 Ordeal

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I Just Felt Like Sharing My PS3 Ordeal

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oxbullsey

Junior Member

28. October 2008 @ 17:46

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Hello all,

I'm going to be making what will probably be an essay-long post about my 'fun' with my PS3. I hope that putting everything into one post will help others in the future who find themselves in one of the many binds I found myself in.

Okay, first off, back in April of 2008, I happened upon a PS3 with a disk reading problem on fleabay. I was able to score it for just over $100. The seller had already diassembled it to the blue ray drive and I figured he'd saved me some work (more on that shortly....).

The unit arrived, I read tutorials, I watched youtube videos and spent probably 20 hours just researching how to disassemble and reassemble these beasts. I looked at everything, there was the laser tray KEM-400AAA and the blue ray controller board with various screws in a zip lock baggie, another baggie with various screws and what-not, and some bubble wrapped metal drive surrounds. The rest of the motherboard and case were still assembled.

So, I merrily put the blue ray drive together, placed it into it's spot, put all of the case screws and top covers back on, hooked everything up to my 42" LCD and turned it on. BAM, there's the XMB. Things are looking good. I try to put a disk into the blue ray and it won't accept it. Nothing. I rebooted and noticed no blinking blue light. Oh well, he had told me it was a dead drive. Off to fleabay I go. I ended up picking up a KEM-400AAA tray for about $80. I take the thing apart again, and realize when comparing the KEM I got with the one that was there, a ribbon cable was missing. WOW, that must be my problem!! I'm good to go here for SURE!. I put everything back together with the new tray, pop it back on the TV, boot it up and still no blue light. Tried a disk, still nothing. Now, I'm looking at the little brown ribbon cable that goes from the worm drive to the daughter board and it looks like it's only 4 pins, and the connector looks like 8 pins. So I email the seller and he says there are in fact two part numbers, maybe I had the wrong one but I was S.O.L. for not doing my research.

My bad I figured, I sell on there, too, so I know what it's like when a buyer tells you they didn't know any better. Water under the bridge I figure. I'll just hunt down the new part. In the meantime, I decided I'd download some demos and play on the thing. So I power it up and try to go to the Sony store to get some demos... <insert family feud WRONG buzzer sound here>, I need to do a system update first.

What harm can that do? I hopped on sony's website and found that they had just redesigned their online store, so I figure this is a great time to update!!!

Boy was that a bad idea. As it turns out, if you try to do a system update without your blue ray drive controller board connected, guess what? You brick your system. Partially anyway. So I'm freaked out now. I rip laptops apart and put them back together, I've changed out security chips, reflashed BIOS's, repaird and replaced surface mounted components, but this system is already getting the best of me and it's less than 2 weeks since it arrived. Anyway, I got stuck at 67% on the updates, and I ended up having to remove the hard drive and reformat it and put it back in to get it working again. Once I did, I manually grabbed the system update on a usb drive and tried it that way. Same result. Now, I'm not sure of the exact time line here, but I ended up buying a dead 60GB motherboard with daughter card that had the same A-4 revision as mine. When that arrived I popped that card onto my blue ray drive and lo-and-behold the blue light lit up and the disks were spinning. YAY ME. So I did my system update, it seemed like it had completed this time, and I was off to the PS store to get some demos. Unfortunately, the wireless decided it wasn't going to be updated so I had to run an ethernet cable from my laptop to the PS3. Once I did that I downloaded like 9 demos. I installed them all. Then I went to try one, clicked on it, the PLAYSTATION 3 logo BLAZED across the screen with that ding dong sound and.............................

nothing.

Black screen.

I let it sit there. Nothing. I reboot. Nothing. WTFDJSFIUF@*#)#!R#!)@. To say I was upset would be the understatement of the year for sure. So, back to the workbench I went. I tore the drive out again and pulled the daughter board. When I did I happened to place it side by side with my original one to make sure they were the same revision. When I did, something didn't look right. It turned out that while packaged so 'safely' in its zip lock baggie, something knocked a coil off of the blue ray board on the original one. OH EM GEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE.

I ended up jumping a piece of solder across where that coil went and put it all back together. Here it was, the moment of truth. All of those hours, days, hell weeks even. It came down to this moment. I pressed the button and the blue light came on, flashed and went dark.

I slowly put in a disk, and the drive took it out of my hand, sucked it in and did nothing with it.

Wow. WTH. So, I figured I'd try an update again as a new one had just come out (2.36 or something). Once I did that, the freaking blue ray drive worked. It worked perfectly. I played and played and played until my thumbs and wrists hurt. There was joy, much joy. Then, for fun, I tried to reconnect with the wireless and the damn thing worked. I, for the first time, had a fully functioning PS3.

Life was good.

GTAIV was ordered

GTAIV was played.

Then about 5 weeks ago GTAIV was no longer played.

I dont' know WTH happened, but I was just firing up the game, I walked the dude out onto the street and suddenly the environment stopped responding. So I tried to exit out of the game, it let me select quit game but it froze. I ended up have to power cycle the system and when it came back the blue ray drive no longer worked.

It was then I realized that the disks were no longer spinning. They came out in exactly the same position that I put them in. Damn. Off to fleabay I go AGAIN. This time I happened across a drive that would play PS2 game, so I figured for the $26 it cost me that it was a good investment. It turns out the person had ripped it apart and now it was making the dreaded clackity clack sounds. That's actually how I ended up here during some searches. I ended up following some of the advice and guides here and got the mechanisms lined up again. I was pretty happy about it. So I put it all back together (for like the 100th time) and fired it up, popped in a disk and nothing. I had the little bubble in the top right corner, but it never showed me a disk. I ejected it and sure as heck, it was in the same damn position I had put it in. This one isn't spinning either.

I've tried two other lasers and a third tray that I've picked up along the way, but I still am not getting any movement at all from the motor. In all I have almost three complete blue ray drives, 4 controller boards and 5 lasers. I can't get it to spin with any of them.

In my last ditch effort, after reading the debate over using other controller boards, I ended up doing system update to 2.50 with the other blue ray board that had the same revision as mine and tried to play a demo. It black screened as well. That tells me that the system doesn't recognize another controller board that isn't 'mated' to the motherboard.

Anyway, that's the long story of my trials and defeats by my PS3. I'm pretty sure I'm going to give up on this one soon and put it up on fleabay and try again. There are a great many success stories around here about people getting their systems going again, and hopefully by compiling all of these tidbits of information we can keep that going.

Sorry about how long this is, and to be honest it probably isn't even half of the stuff I've tried, but hopefully it will help someone else out by keeping them from buying something that won't work, or to realize that misery loves company.

If you just scrolled to the end of this, here's the cliff notes:

PS3 wins in a long battle to the death with Bullseye. :(

[ + quote]

Bullseye