iTunes error #1 and reflowing

"Hey Josh,

you will not like my answear but here it comes:

error1 are one of the hardest problems to repair. As you already stated correctly the problem is most likely the baseband chips. You can not replace those, and damaging them with heat makes the whole phone useless. Why ? Apple tied different IC's together (NAND, Baseband, BB CPU) damaging one, means replacing all 3 of those which will end up in an phone you can only use for parts, when repairing waterdamaged phones.

Most error 1 are caused by waterdamage (which you excluded) and by drops. So why not reflow ? 9 out of 10 reflows might end up worse than they were before you reflowed it. Its not like on a xbox or playstion where you heat a chip and hope the solder will melt and reastablish the connection with the board (not a good repair btw).

Baseband IC'S are also glued, which will make any reflow of them useless.

IF the reason for your baseband erorr is the baseband IC, then you would have to remove it entirely, remove all glue from board and IC, reball that IC and resolder it. This is not easy especially if you do this for the first time. Even then, there is no guarantee that it will be fixed.

So What to do ? You decide !

Me personally, I hate it when I see this error.

Update

Apple links many parts inside on a phone. It is getting more complicated every time a new phone is beeing released making repairs harder and even some day impossible. the baseband of every phone is linked to other and reprogramming is not possible to my knowledge. I heard of a chineese group who was able to change the serial number of a phone, if true. It seems possible. But that is far beyond my reach since noone made it public."

"Some folks suspect that the problem on these is actually trashed Flash chip(s) and not in fact a hardware fault.

In particular the wear leveling seems to break down and result in this fault, if some way could be found to simply zero the entire memory then reload it from scratch the problem would be gone.

I had some success ""nuking"" 32GB microSDs, so far 3 good out of 3 although they didn't last much more than a month at least it proved the technique is sound and triggers wear leveling of the bad sectors when all else fails.

It was an experimental setup with a 9V gas igniter transformer running at 27V with a series current limiter, feeding into either a 5642 or any old cheap radio valve with a Mg getter such as ""made in UK"" ones.

My X-ray meter was clicking away merrily so this was full spectrum down to <5KeV.

Its the low energy X-rays that are the most hazardous and needless to say this is not a recommended technique unless you are trying to wipe memory chips on purpose.

YMMV, lead lined everything and preferably two layers of shielding between you and the device with failsafes and suchlike.

Note that your average tube will *not* pick these up it has to be an end window or thin wall Bi cored tube such as the SBM series with no compensation shielding running at >450V and a compensation network to prevent destructive oscillation."

hi josh. i'm interested to know if you tried reflowing the baseband chip? i'm having some problems that i think are also connected to that chip