Ylod Ps3

[marnold]

I didn't know what a "YLOD" was until last night. Now I wish I didn't know. YLOD ("Yellow Light/LED Of Death") is the PS3 equivalent of the Xbox 360's RROD. My son was playing the Pure demo when the PS3 locked. Upon attempting to restart, the green light came on, then it went yellow, beeped three times, and then flashed red. That indicates a hardware failure. Thus my options are paying $150 to get mine fixed or paying $299 to get one of the new PS3 Slims. I'm kinda ticked since we only got it in November of 2007.

Anyway, one option is to attempt to revive it myself. I'm not sure how keen I am on this. Reports are that most YLOD come from the fact that the heat generated by the console actually causes the points where the CPU and GPU are soldered to the motherboard to fail. Some have found success with a rather brute-force form of shotgunning it using a heat gun. I would assume that theoretically I could get my soldering iron and some silver solder and shotgun it properly. I would assume that the chance of permanently damaging the chips would be relatively high. But technically I can't brick it further than it already is. Sony, of course, would refuse to even look at it if I tried this.

Soldering gurus, would it be worth a try? Would it be possible to remove the silver solder altogether and use good old-fashioned leaded solder, or would that increase the degree of difficulty too much?

[SuperSwede]

Must be a rare problem? I never heard about it before but I know a lot of friends xboxes that died the RROD death (and so did my first one).

[marnold]

Must be a rare problem? I never heard about it before but I know a lot of friends xboxes that died the RROD death (and so did my first one).
Thankfully, I think it is. Unfortunately, it hit me.

[Kazz]

Rev...from what I am reading the YLOD indicates a hard drive issue. A couple of the articles I read suggest pulling the drive out and putting it in your computer blowing out the partitions and reformatting then reloading the firmware.

[duhvoodooman]

Rev...from what I am reading the YLOD indicates a hard drive issue. A couple of the articles I read suggest pulling the drive out and putting it in your computer blowing out the partitions and reformatting then reloading the firmware.
That sounds worth a try, and a whole lot easier than attacking the PS3 guts with soldering iron!

[marnold]

Rev...from what I am reading the YLOD indicates a hard drive issue. A couple of the articles I read suggest pulling the drive out and putting it in your computer blowing out the partitions and reformatting then reloading the firmware.
YLOD just indicates an irrecoverable hardware failure somewhere. It could be the hard drive. Most often it is the heat issue I referenced. I pulled the hard drive entirely and it still YLODded. We ended up buying a PS3 Slim. I disemboweled the old one to get the copy of Batman: Arkham Asylum out of there. I may try to do something with the old one, but at this point I am not confident that I could get everything back together again.

[SuperSwede]

*sigh* my 360 RROD today (again)!

I called MS that said that they have extended the warranty for the RROD problems to 3 years so mine will be repaired for free.. but it will take 2-3 weeks and I just bought a couple of new games! arrrrr...