X-men vs. SF 961023 De-Suicided...with a wrinkle

[NoAffinity]

I got this board off a fellow collector, knowing it wasn't working. I tested it as soon as I received it, it appeared to boot to a suicide screen. I then ran it with the suicide tester inserted in socket 03, and it came up in the suicide tester program, confirming it was suicided but all else is good. I then spent about an hour trying to reprogram the encryption key, with no success.

So, I opened up the board, and after some careful scrutiny and comparing against a known good XVSF board, found that a diode at D1 had been, what appeared to be, scraped off of the board. The points at D2 which would normally route to and from D1 had been jumpered with a resistor. Why anybody would ever do this is perplexing.

After waiting 3 weeks for a replacement diode to come in from China, and a bit of tedious soldering on some small areas, the board is again alive.

[invzim]

Good job! Out of curiosity and future reference, what type of diode was it?

[NoAffinity]

The exact listing on ebay reads: 1SS184 Diode Case SOT23 Make TOSHIBA

[leonardoliveira]

Why didn't you buy a through hole version? The traces were screwed up anyway. It's funny that you solder a SMD part to the spot originally meant to take a through hole diode.

You would likely be able to source the correct equivalent locally, too.

[NoAffinity]

The original was not a through hole version. See the diode at d5. I replaced the missing diode at d1 with an exact replacement and soldered to the points at d2 because the pads at d1 had been scraped off the board. Possibly a through hole version in a different package type could work but I didn't want to think that hard about it.

After taking the picture, I hot glued the replacement in place. Not the most elegant, but making the best of a bad situation.