Yellow Light of Death!

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mrknapp33
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Yellow Light of Death!

Post by mrknapp33 »

My PS3 got it four days ago. In this time I have tried the following:
1) Took apart the PS3 to clean out dust.
2) Cleaned off the thermal compound.
3) Baked the motherboard in the oven at 200 F for 35 minutes.
4) Reapplied new thermal compound.
Did not work.
Then I tried the hair dryer technique (blow a hairdryer at the back vents for 15 minutes and let it cool down).
Did not work.
Anyone have any other experience and tips for this?
Anyone want to buy a PS3 for the parts?

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Re: Yellow Light of Death!

Post by xodacia81 »

Damn. That sucks. Nope, not interested in parts unless they belong to Pippa...

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Re: Yellow Light of Death!

Post by mrknapp33 »

xodacia81 wrote:Damn. That sucks. Nope, not interested in parts unless they belong to Pippa...
Is she still news? Thought the world had moved onto the next tart.

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Re: Yellow Light of Death!

Post by etos45 »

I don't know if it's the same as with the Xbox, but I don't think cooking the board was a good idea. My understanding is that it's bad for some of the electrical components and it's definitely bad for any of the plastic parts. For Xbox, I always used a heat gun and arctic silver 5 to fix the red ring (same as the yellow light for PS3) problems and they've all been a success (fixed two of mine and three of my friends). I think the reason the heat gun is better is because you can control where the heat is going and how much.

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Re: Yellow Light of Death!

Post by mrknapp33 »

I had not heard of the YLOD until it happened to me. The RROD has been way more publicized than the YLOD, probably due to a higher proliferation of the RROD. The only resources I had for the YLOD were the PS3 forums and youtube. The heat gun did seem to work, but a few people had written in about the oven technique. I figured nothing ventured, nothing gained.

As it stands, I bought a new PS3 today. Still cheaper than a good blu ray player. Perhaps I will play around with the old PS3 and borrow my friend's heat gun.

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Re: Yellow Light of Death!

Post by etos45 »

mrknapp33 wrote:I had not heard of the YLOD until it happened to me. The RROD has been way more publicized than the YLOD, probably due to a higher proliferation of the RROD. The only resources I had for the YLOD were the PS3 forums and youtube. The heat gun did seem to work, but a few people had written in about the oven technique. I figured nothing ventured, nothing gained.

As it stands, I bought a new PS3 today. Still cheaper than a good blu ray player. Perhaps I will play around with the old PS3 and borrow my friend's heat gun.
Yeah, unfortunately for Xbox, it seems the RROD is a much more common thing. Probably a good reason why you should not to rush to beat the competition to launch. Although, it's also a great way to get yourself an Xbox on the cheap. :D I think the YLOD is actually somewhat common, but only in the fat models. I guess they caught on and fixed it before releasing the slims.

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Re: Yellow Light of Death!

Post by mrknapp33 »

I had one of the fat models, although not an original release model.

As far as the new model, I enjoy it's slimness, but I preferred the shiny black and chrome trim as opposed to the matte finish the new one has. However, I much rather have a 160 GB HD as opposed to a 60 GB one.

Is it possible for me to swap in my old drive, download my save game info to a flash drive, then transfer that to my new HD? I have over 100 hours of Fallout 3 on there that I want!

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Re: Yellow Light of Death!

Post by etos45 »

mrknapp33 wrote:I had one of the fat models, although not an original release model.

As far as the new model, I enjoy it's slimness, but I preferred the shiny black and chrome trim as opposed to the matte finish the new one has. However, I much rather have a 160 GB HD as opposed to a 60 GB one.

Is it possible for me to swap in my old drive, download my save game info to a flash drive, then transfer that to my new HD? I have over 100 hours of Fallout 3 on there that I want!
Yeah, I believe they both use the SATA laptop hard drives, so swapping should be a problem. I don't know about the slims, but the fats have a door on the left side that unscrews and slides right out. I would think you could copy the saves to a flash drive. If not, you could always get PlayStation Plus and use their server saves or whatever it's call. I'm a bigger fan of the fats since they offer hardware emulation for the PS1/2 games. I don't think the slims support all of the games (or maybe any, not sure).

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Re: Yellow Light of Death!

Post by mrknapp33 »

etos45 wrote:
mrknapp33 wrote:I had one of the fat models, although not an original release model.

As far as the new model, I enjoy it's slimness, but I preferred the shiny black and chrome trim as opposed to the matte finish the new one has. However, I much rather have a 160 GB HD as opposed to a 60 GB one.

Is it possible for me to swap in my old drive, download my save game info to a flash drive, then transfer that to my new HD? I have over 100 hours of Fallout 3 on there that I want!
Yeah, I believe they both use the SATA laptop hard drives, so swapping should be a problem. I don't know about the slims, but the fats have a door on the left side that unscrews and slides right out. I would think you could copy the saves to a flash drive. If not, you could always get PlayStation Plus and use their server saves or whatever it's call. I'm a bigger fan of the fats since they offer hardware emulation for the PS1/2 games. I don't think the slims support all of the games (or maybe any, not sure).
I tried the hard drive swap, but the new ps3 could not load the older software. I will look into the plus saves idea. I think i wlso read that i can wttach the hard drive to my pc. Maybe i can explore it that way.

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Re: Yellow Light of Death!

Post by etos45 »

I was going to suggest hooking it up to your laptop, but I'm pretty sure it's going to be in some weird format (like how Wii and Xbox is) so you might need a third party software to access it. It should be doable, though. Either way, PlayStation Plus won't do you any good if you can't get the hard drive to read on your PS3, it'll only solve future headaches.

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Re: Yellow Light of Death!

Post by mrknapp33 »

Hopefully I won't have any future headaches. Otherwise, I am going back to my PS2. 10 years and still going strong.

Looks like I will just have to replay Fallout New Vegas or Uncharted 2 instead on Fallout 3. Oh well.

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Re: Yellow Light of Death!

Post by IMJ »

This is so strange. So help I was coming here to post this very same thing happened to mine yesterday. Interestingly enough, I was just playing Call of Duty Black Ops two days ago for the first time after owning it for months.

I use my PS3 for everything at my house - I've rigged it in ways that essentially make it a home media server for movies, music, photos, gaming, Netflix, Hulu, memory storage, etc. I've had the 80g model for four years now and it's even networked to my laptop for quick file swapping between the two, etc.

And today I came home from work and was going to watch something and BAM! YLOD. And to top it off the damn thing has eaten one of my Clone Wars Blu Ray discs from the boxed set, so now I've got to disassemble the system to rip the disc out of the Blu Ray drive. I've got no idea what to do with this PS3 now, and the really crappy thing is that I could buy another one, but it won't have anywhere near the functionality or ports of my (what was originally) 80g model - it was 80g until I threw a 600+ gig HD in it.

The interesting thing is that I've been playing COD Black Ops and much of what I've read online has people mentioning that COD Black Ops was what they were playing when their system bricked on them too...

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Re: Yellow Light of Death!

Post by etos45 »

Man, that sucks about your PS3... if you're taking it apart anyways, you may want to invest the $20 to buy a heat gun and some arctic silver 5 and try to do a solder reflow. From what I understand, it fixes the majority of YLODs. I'm not sure what all functionality you might lose with a new PS3, though, outside of some backwards compatibility and you can always put the larger drive in the new one, you'll just have to format it because apparently the drive encryption is based on the console ID.

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Re: Yellow Light of Death!

Post by mrknapp33 »

IMJ wrote:This is so strange. So help I was coming here to post this very same thing happened to mine yesterday. Interestingly enough, I was just playing Call of Duty Black Ops two days ago for the first time after owning it for months.

I use my PS3 for everything at my house - I've rigged it in ways that essentially make it a home media server for movies, music, photos, gaming, Netflix, Hulu, memory storage, etc. I've had the 80g model for four years now and it's even networked to my laptop for quick file swapping between the two, etc.

And today I came home from work and was going to watch something and BAM! YLOD. And to top it off the damn thing has eaten one of my Clone Wars Blu Ray discs from the boxed set, so now I've got to disassemble the system to rip the disc out of the Blu Ray drive. I've got no idea what to do with this PS3 now, and the really crappy thing is that I could buy another one, but it won't have anywhere near the functionality or ports of my (what was originally) 80g model - it was 80g until I threw a 600+ gig HD in it.

The interesting thing is that I've been playing COD Black Ops and much of what I've read online has people mentioning that COD Black Ops was what they were playing when their system bricked on them too...
You can get the disc out using the super fan spin trick. Turn off the main power switch. Hold down the eject button and keep holding it while you turn back on the power. The disc should eject. Won't do anything for the YLOD, unfortunately.

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Re: Yellow Light of Death!

Post by IMJ »

mrknapp33 wrote:
IMJ wrote:This is so strange. So help I was coming here to post this very same thing happened to mine yesterday. Interestingly enough, I was just playing Call of Duty Black Ops two days ago for the first time after owning it for months.

I use my PS3 for everything at my house - I've rigged it in ways that essentially make it a home media server for movies, music, photos, gaming, Netflix, Hulu, memory storage, etc. I've had the 80g model for four years now and it's even networked to my laptop for quick file swapping between the two, etc.

And today I came home from work and was going to watch something and BAM! YLOD. And to top it off the damn thing has eaten one of my Clone Wars Blu Ray discs from the boxed set, so now I've got to disassemble the system to rip the disc out of the Blu Ray drive. I've got no idea what to do with this PS3 now, and the really crappy thing is that I could buy another one, but it won't have anywhere near the functionality or ports of my (what was originally) 80g model - it was 80g until I threw a 600+ gig HD in it.

The interesting thing is that I've been playing COD Black Ops and much of what I've read online has people mentioning that COD Black Ops was what they were playing when their system bricked on them too...
You can get the disc out using the super fan spin trick. Turn off the main power switch. Hold down the eject button and keep holding it while you turn back on the power. The disc should eject. Won't do anything for the YLOD, unfortunately.
I've tried that repeatedly. Doesn't work....

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Re: Yellow Light of Death!

Post by mrknapp33 »

IMJ wrote:
mrknapp33 wrote:
IMJ wrote:This is so strange. So help I was coming here to post this very same thing happened to mine yesterday. Interestingly enough, I was just playing Call of Duty Black Ops two days ago for the first time after owning it for months.

I use my PS3 for everything at my house - I've rigged it in ways that essentially make it a home media server for movies, music, photos, gaming, Netflix, Hulu, memory storage, etc. I've had the 80g model for four years now and it's even networked to my laptop for quick file swapping between the two, etc.

And today I came home from work and was going to watch something and BAM! YLOD. And to top it off the damn thing has eaten one of my Clone Wars Blu Ray discs from the boxed set, so now I've got to disassemble the system to rip the disc out of the Blu Ray drive. I've got no idea what to do with this PS3 now, and the really crappy thing is that I could buy another one, but it won't have anywhere near the functionality or ports of my (what was originally) 80g model - it was 80g until I threw a 600+ gig HD in it.

The interesting thing is that I've been playing COD Black Ops and much of what I've read online has people mentioning that COD Black Ops was what they were playing when their system bricked on them too...
You can get the disc out using the super fan spin trick. Turn off the main power switch. Hold down the eject button and keep holding it while you turn back on the power. The disc should eject. Won't do anything for the YLOD, unfortunately.
I've tried that repeatedly. Doesn't work....
Time to open it up, then. It is not too bad to open. If you do not feel confident, there are some good youtube videos that easily show how to do it.

A few months ago, my wonderful 3-year-old decided to shove a plastic coin into the blu-ray slot because it fit.


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