Damaged USB-C Port Destroyed This LAPTOP | I Have Never Seen This!
All right, it's a new day, and I have a new laptop to work on. This is an XPS 9315. And here's the deal with this one. The customers note says that it won't charge off the USB-C port, so it actually won't run off the USB-C ports, It will actually run off the battery if it's charged up. I had a technician check that, which means that the issue is going to be inside the charge circuit.
Let's see if we can get this laptop fixed up. I already had one of my techs working on this, and he's already taken it apart. And he pulled the board out. Look at the size of this board. That's the whole thing.
The heatsink is almost the size of the actual motherboard? Look at that. And it does have a cooling fan at least is not passive cooled. But the hard drive is built on this motherboard. So let's figure out if we can get this thing to work here. So I'm just going to start by plugging it in to a USB power meter. Let's see what type of current is being drawn.
There's two USB ports on this one, but one is on daughter board on the other side. So I plug that in. Nothing happens.
The light stays on, on the charger here. But my tech was saying that it actually turned off the the light on his charger. I'm not seeing that on mine. Okay, so here's the daughter board. So the daughter board is right there.
But let me go ahead and I'm going to look around, see if I see any shorts on this motherboard. That'd be the first thing to check. And. Look around. So here's where the USB-C port is. And it comes in through here.
And where does it go? I've actually never worked on this motherboard before. See if we can identify some of these chips. So this is a Bios chip and it's only an 80.
So it's a one MB chip. Which means this probably is the Bios for something like a PD controller or something like that, or even a Thunderbolt. And then on this side we have... ...let's see what that coil has on it. This is a one terabyte. This is where the SSD is. So since this laptop works off a battery, we know that the the issue is going to be on the charge side before it gets to the main power rail.
So let's put my meter in continuity mode. I'm just going to check this coil real quick. This is probably the main power rail coil, so it's probably won’t be shorted.
And we want to figure out let's check one of these coils over here. So is this a coil or cap. I can't tell That looks like a coil or inductor.
See the color. See capacitor is going to be that kind of orange color. I doubt you can even tell on this because the colors so off. Let me zoom in a little bit. They almost look like the same color. And this is showing 8.5Ω.
So I'm thinking that's an inductor. Otherwise it's a shorted power rail. So but let's keep looking around. We'll check some of these other caps over here. That's showing 8.3.
Also. Okay. I'm just looking around a little bit. It's. I don't see a spill. Let's bring back out for you.
trying to find the input power circuit. So let's check some of these current sense. I mean, the main board is not shorted because it works. So yeah. So this is what I'm saying. It looks like an inductor right here. So this is an inductor. That's a capacitor.
That's 8.42. I'm starting to think this is. There's a short over here.
That's not shorted. That's not shorted. So we might need to come with the power supply. And thermal camera.
Let's go ahead and let's do that. So I'm going to go ahead and use this capacitors over here. And we'll check that real quick.
Actually what we'll do here. Let's check the ground. That's actually. So if I check from here to here. That's zero. And if I go from here to here, that's eight.
Okay. So we definitely have eight ohms right here. So we know that. If we're measure here and it's... ...Basically zero. We know that that's ground. And we measure on that side, we have nine ohms, and nine ohms is too low.
So we're going to inject some power right here and put it on the thermal camera and see what heats up. See if we can figure out what's shorted out. Okay, so we got we got the thermal camera set up. This is my Flir One pro.
I have it attached to the bottom of my microscope. It's down here. You can see it right there. My Flir one pro is attached to the bottom of the microscope.
I have a wire running up, and it's connecting to my cell phone, which I have attached up here onto a phone mount. This allows me to look through the microscope and see this at the same time. Okay, so what we're going to do is I'm going to plug this in and see if we see anything heat up. I don't see anything because it's not even actually turning on to communicate. So I doubt that was going to work.
So let's go ahead and do the... ... I’m going to inject some voltage using this short killer. I think I say this in every video. I don't recommend the short killer. I bought it early on and the really the only thing I actually like about it is that. The, whenever you are finding a short. So...
But the main issue is that you can adjust the amps that you're putting in there. You can only adjust the voltage. So I always put it down to 0.8V. And if I if I'm sure that there's not going to be a short on the GPU or CPU or memory or something like that, then I will go up.
But on this one we're going to start with 0.8. We actually know that there's no short on the main, rail. So it shouldn't be an issue. But we're going to start with point eight and it will beep whenever I apply the voltage here. So this side ground.
So you see it jumps jumps up to 14 amps because it's on ground. So that's how many amps it's putting to ground. But I'm going to go on the other side and you can hear I don't know if you can hear the whistle, but there's a little whistle that's happening.
And so it's not quite an amp being put in there. So I'm going to go up a couple Okay a little bit more. Okay.
So we're at 1.5V. It's making a little whistle noise. Now let's look around see if we see anything heating up.
And do again. Okay. It's getting hot in this area. Which means it's, is there something on this side then? Because it's, when it's getting hot in this area.
There's nothing else over here. Well, I guess there's a couple little capacitors here, but. So, again, we're not even pulling one amp.
When I'm doing this. We have 1.5V going in, and we're not even pulling one amp. See how this corner is heating up right here. So it's heating up.
There's something that's getting hot. I don't know exactly what it is yet, but let's see if we can zoom in and put some alcohol on these capacitors. There might be one of these capacitors. Might be bad. So now we'll eject again.
I'm not seeing anything. You would actually see this, the alcohol drive around one of these. And I'm not seeing anything. Okay, so let's, let's flip it over and see if we can figure out what's getting hot over here. There's not much over here. Still. It's only a couple things.
Let me see if we can figure out where the short is on this side. Okay. So that's 15. So this one right here is 15 on that side, 15Ω. And this is zero on this side. You know, it's kind of interesting.
I'm not really sure. All right. Let's inject power again. We'll inject that 1.5V just like before. Is it inside it? That's interesting.
Let me look down in here. I don't see any bent pins, so it's kind of like, dirty, though. Does kind of look a little bit dirty.
We might need to up the voltage. Let's go ahead and up the voltage some more. Because whatever it is isn't getting hot enough for us to see it. So now we're at two volts.
Still, I'm not worried about burning out like a CPU or GPU. That's the whole reason why, there's a whole reason to keep the voltage down. And which still not even at 1 amp. I mean, is this inside the layers? I mean, this is evaporating really fast here.
It's almost like it's inside the layers. There. It's very strange. Yeah. We're going a little bit more on our voltage.
I usually never go that high on this. With this box here. Okay, we finally found it. Or did we? We did that and smoke came out, but we don't know what it is. So I got one amp.
Something's getting really hot right here, and we still don't know what it is. It's the strangest thing I've ever seen. It must be in the board layers or something. Or is it one of these capacitors? Right here? Or maybe it's one of these diodes. Okay, let's try this right there. Something over here.
We put a lot of alcohol this time. See if we can get this to move around. Yeah, something's pulsing right there. I don't know, it's inside the board... ...Layers. I mean, I guess it could be a broken pin inside this USB-C port. I've never seen that before, but.
Because there's something. There's something down in here. So let's take this port off and let's see if we could figure out what's going on, because there's.
I really don't know. I mean, I really don't want to take the port off of the port is, not damaged. It's like boiling from underneath the USB-C port. It's like coming out of the USB-C port. Okay, well, I guess that definitely means we need to take this port off.
I went the port is burning hot. If I touch the USB-C port. So I've never seen a shorted out USB-C port, especially when you look inside and it looks fine. I've never seen that before.
So let's take this port off and see if that fixes the issue. I... This is a first. There's always a first for something right? I got to prep the area with kapton tape and let's get going on that real quick.
Yeah. Let's keep it on tape. There's a high temperature tape that helps protect, components. And since the hard drives nearby, I want to be very careful not to mess up their data. So I'm going to cover all this stuff up like that.
I'm also going to add this thermal pad here. So let's go ahead and get this USB-C port taken off. So what I'm going to do I'll add a little flux first. Flux helps the solder flow very easily. So I'm just adding a layer here.
There's a lot of different ways to get these things off. But what I like to do is kind of get the area ready. So you know, this is actually a surface mount only USB-C port. Sometimes there's they're kind of both. They have through hole back here they would have a row through hole and then a row of flush mount. But this is a double flush mount or a surface mount.
I mean going to go ahead and add some low melt solder in the mounting brackets. And that will help it come off easier. All right, so we're just adding solder to all these mounting points. And I'm going to go ahead and wick out some of it just to make it a little easier for me.
This is just how I do it. It doesn’t mean it's the right way. But I like to at least make it a little easier for this stuff to come off. I don't like to have to struggle to get the port out.
I don't want to rip the pads. And what ends up happening a lot? If you overheat this area, you'll knock off some of these chips. Then you have to deal with that. So if I just get at least most of the solder out, makes a little easier on me. So I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to take this off with fairly high temperature. We're going to go with 450c which is a lot hotter than I normally would recommend on a USB-C port because all this plastic is going to melt.
But I'm not trying to save this usb-C port. If you want to save this, and you need to try to take it off with about 300 degrees, this plastic melts at 260. So. 300 you can usually keep the plastic from melting. But I'm not worried about saving this, especially since this thing is shorting out and smoking. So I'm going to slowly heat this area.
Try not to heat up too much on these chips, because I definitely don't want to worry about the... ...I don't want to worry about any of those chips coming off. Yeah. So let's take a look at this.
See, with this out of the way here, let's see why is this shorted here? What is going on? Do you see it is bubbling in here. Maybe. Or is that from me? Just taking it off.
What I'm interested to see is, is the short gone? Because again, I've never seen a USB-C port. This pins are straight. Have a short internally. Very strange. Okay, turn off all of this.
Let's check again. If the short is there. On continuity mode. I actually can't see.
I have to come. Okay, so this was the capacitor that was showing shorted. And the short is gone. Can you believe it? The short is gone. I guess it's a first for everything. So there you go.
This USB-C port was internally shorted. causing it to smoke when I was injecting voltage. So the question is, do I have any of these? I hope I do. Let me go through all my ports here. No... This one looks close.
look at that. Bingo! We found the right one. So I'm gonna go ahead and pull one of these out of here. All right, so here's our new USB-C port. Let's get this cleaned out all the way and then we'll, we'll do a dry test fit. See this spot right here still needs to get some solder taken out of there.
So I'll add a little bit of solder again like I did before. This makes it a lot easier to get the solder back out. So I do that. And then we'll use of solder wick.
There are lots of flux. You'd be surprised how good of a solder you become when you just use some flux. Some good flux. Okay, look at that. It's clear.
All right. That's the only hole we need to actually clear. So let's go ahead and do a test fit. the pins are on this side. So we have the pins on this side. Fit on like that.
Let's drop it in the holes... ...that all lines up fit in there perfectly. All right. So let's go ahead and Install a new one of these and see if that fixes our issue. All right. So we're going to prep these pads just like we prep the other ones.
And we're going to make sure we don't put solder back in those holes yet. Solder on here. Got it all nice and clean. Ready to go.
And here's the trick on getting this on here. So here's what we do. We're going to put a lot of flux here because again flux is our best friend.
We're going to take the new port, we're going to set it in here like so. I want what we want is to make sure that it sits perfectly flat so that. But we don't want to crunch it down yet because, the solder on these pads are actually risen up a little bit. And if we start pressing down on this, then we can bend these pins. We don't want to bend these pins.
We only want to make this sit down into the solder once it melts. So we're kind of going to get it all positioned the way we want it. We're going to set our heat hot air at 300. Now.
We're going to slowly come in here but we're going to pay attention. We don't want to melt any of this plastic. I'm holding it gently in place, not applying a bunch of pressure or anything, and I'm trying to heat the back here so I can melt the solder. I can see some sort of already melting, some solder, some solder. Okay. It looks like all the solder is melted. So we're going to hold it down in place.
Now I'm going to press down a little bit harder now moving the heat away. But I'm still holding pressure. It should be solder. But we want to make sure that's soldered all the way to the back.
We can't see the second row of pins. So I like to just to be sure I'm I'm going to add another pile of flux. And I'm going to heat it one more time. And again we're set to 300 degrees C.
There you go. It's melting melting, melting melting. And then press down. And move away but we're still going to keep applying pressure. Okay.
It's cooled off. Now, it should be solder perfectly. So the last step would be to actually solder these mounting bracket points. You see how it still moves a little bit. So we're going to apply a little bit of pressure. And then we're going to solder that first one. There.
Let's put some flux in each spot. So this is kind of tricky I don't have enough hands. So I'm going to go ahead and put a little solder on the soldering iron.
And then we can do this. Let's add a little more solder to the soldering iron. Apply a little more pressure here. Okay. So we have those first two solder. So now the correct way to solder this is to heat up the surface with this soldering iron and then come in with the solder.
That's the correct way of doing it. All right. There you go Let's get everything cleaned up with isopropyl alcohol. Clean the other side. So it's all looking good.
Now, the big question. Did it fix it? I don't know, I kind of want to go straight to this. Instead of testing for the short first. I think I'm just going to go straight to it. because I've actually never seen a USB-C port shorted out.
And the moment of truth. Look at that. Comes on turned back off.
And then is it going to come back on? Came on for a second. This may actually need to be installed in the laptop. It might need the battery. Yeah I bet, but I think that's showing that the shorts gone.
Actually, let's just do it with the battery. So I'm just going to quickly attach this to the battery and see if it will start charging. A lot of these smaller systems need the battery attached in order for it to function, because it kind of works hand-in-hand with the battery. It's a low voltage. Five volts stays on.
Nope. Oh, back on 20V and laptops turning on. The CPU is getting hot. So that's a success.
All right, let's get a completely assembled. See if we get this laptop to turn on now. All right, let's go into the Bios and take a look. All right. What we have here a battery batteries at 1% says charging 60 watt charger. So the charger is being detected and the battery's showing up is charging.
We're going to go ahead and unplug it. It's running off the battery. Plug it back in.
Running off the charger. There you go. A usb-C port that actually was shorted internally. That's. That's a pretty strange one.
There's a first for everything. I saved it on a laptop.
2024-12-28 03:40
