820-00165 very intermittent boot

2informaticos

Administrator
Staff member
Try reballing SMC first.

Random boot issue can be caused be broken solder/trace; any sign of dropped machine?

Can also be accumulated crap under CPU.
You can try to eliminate it heating CPU to 180 degrees, for 20-30s; use quality flux.

A new full BIOS (clean ME) can be tried too.
 
Would have tried reballing the SMC, but the stencil I have ordered hasn't arrived yet.

So a little update is that I removed the spi rom chip from the board and replaced it with another boards one, and it seems to always power on now but it takes double the time for backlight to appear and once it attempts to boot it slows down around 3/4 the way and then hangs at the end of the progress bar - Going to assume this is clean ME issues, and had attempted to clean it (never done it before). I don't have medusa so using the clip method, so I removed the chip from the board and reprogrammed it but still same issue.. Will try again tomorrow with a full rewrite of the chip, but might just try read from the original chip and write to the new chip.
 
Would you like me to upload the original bios with its original ME, as well as the replacement chips bios as well? I've got backups of both before attempting any clean ME. Not sure if I have to change the serial number on the replacement to match the original as I'm currently doing this just to test if its the fault.
 
I've actually managed to sort this board out - New bios chip and cleaned original bios ME and programmed it to the new chip and seems to boot fine!
 
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