Losing sleep over a phone... #tech

My customer left his phone on his nightstand and when he woke up it showed no signs of life.The phone contains all of the pictures he has of his daughter and his father.These pictures mean the world to him so let's see what we can do.under the CPU and when you heat it up too much, the glue expands and then spits out solder balls.

Let's go ahead and plug this motherboard into a power supply and we can see an immediate amp draw indicating a short.So let's use a thermal camera and we can see a chip heating up right over here.Since we don't have any schematics for this motherboard, this phone is going to be a guessing game.I know from experience that this chip is connected directly to the battery.And when we test the battery line, we can see that it's short.So let's remove this chip and yup, the short is So let's quickly replace it, but there's another short right over here when we check the thermal camera I don't see anything heating up at 2 amps I continue to inject power into multiple parts of the line and still nothing heats up Whatever short must be protected or possibly dispersing the heat across a large area Sometimes these large chips that control Wi -Fi and cellular could be the cause and after removing all those chips There's still a short after scratching my head for a minute.

I decided to take off this PMIC, and yup, the short is gone.This chip actually goes straight to the CPU, so that's not really a great thing.Let's replace this chip and test.Now when we try to power on the phone, it just falls flat on its face.The only possibility is that the CPU is slightly disconnected from the board.So the next step here is to transfer the CPU, RAM, storage, and EEPROM to a brand new board.

First, we'll prep a donor board by removing all of these important chips.Then we'll desolder all of my customer's chips and the and results.will be a good stripped out donor board and all of my customer's chips reballed and ready to install.I just finished installing these chips onto the donor board, so let's try powering on the phone, and now it's stuck at 300mA and it's still not turning on.Let's try some last ditch efforts, I'm going to remove the RAM and replace it with a new one.And nope, the phone still doesn't turn on.

So here's the recap.I tested the storage off camera and it came back healthy.Then I replaced the RAM with a known good one.Then we also replaced the entire freaking motherboard.The last piece of the puzzle that we can't test is the CPU.So basically the CPU is dead.

What I think happened is that the PMIC shorted out and hurt the CPU.Without the CPU we can't recover any data.This is the part of my job that I hate the most.It's hard not to care when someone loses something that they really cherish.Not everything is recoverable, but we'll go to the end to find out.If you need something recovered, the link's in the bio piece.